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Comment by fsloth | Hacker News Reader

Weirdly the reverse is true as well - as a rule of thumb hardware companies seem to be abysmal at software (lots of industry examples).

I wonder what causes this hardware/software incompatibility.

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Having worked at both. Hardware companies treat thier software like hardware. They spend a ton of time planning and iterate very slowly. It's very waterfall. I think one of the key advantages Tesla has is they are the opposite. They iterate on their hardware like software. They make hardware changes all the time so they can hill climb faster. And while Toyota invented TPS they seem to be stuck at some local maxima and the scope of changes they make with hardware are limited or slow compared to software.

To have good technical leadership, the leaders need to be well versed of all parts of the stack used in the products. It is hard to find generalists that broad given how much experience and education is necessary to reach high enough in each field

Heck even software-only companies have problems with this where the technical leadership is, for example, of backend background and they completely fail in frontend and data analysis fronts while having rock solid security.

Hmmmm, sounds like my future niche then. I’ve got a PhD in electronics, developed a consumer product and ran a factory for 8 years to make it, been in dev for 5 years (on top of 10 years of coding) and am now a CTO for a software company.

What even would that role be called? I suppose CTO but if a company that does HW and SW.

Chief Technology Unicorn just doesn't have the same nice ring to it.

Also there's T shaped skills and there's you with:

  _________
     /|\
    / | \
   /  |  \
  /   |   \

Not trying to be snarky, just trying to point out the rarity of such a skill set imo.

FYI that is the character for "don't" / "no" / "not" in Chinese.

Usually the right slash of 不 doesn't touch the rest, so I didn't notice it

Lol, I quite like CTU but we are dangerously close to the Coding Ninja type job descriptions of the 2010s!

No snark taken, I’ve got plenty of blind spots in my skills so those T stems should be a little shallower probably but I’ve been fortunate to cover a lot of ground in the last 15 years.

That is a rare combination skillset. And awesome for the company that needs it.

I suggest founder/CEO as a title :)

I have a similar (but less impressive) background, and I like to joke that I'm a "full spectrum" SWE.

Dunning Kruger effect at organizational scale

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

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