This comes down to the caliber of people you want to work with. Given that your skill set is what it is - the role doesn't change who you are - do you want to work with people with abilities such that you have to lead them or with people that can lead you?

At a decently run tech company, the expectation for a lead is to able to technically guide and mentor junior engineers as to allow them to be productive and help develop eventually into senior engineers. Junior or mid-level engineers, even at companies that hire "the best" or whatever, are often clueless about a wide range of technical matters (often the issue is that they don't know what they don't know) and without some technical supervision, will not be able to successfully deliver on projects. Leads need to fill in the gap, whether by themselves or through others, but their overall technical understanding or judgment generally needs to be on par with or exceed that of the senior engineers on the team.

What is the point of all these posts here - is there something wrong with businesses being run by business people? Business people can have a wide range of backgrounds - technical, legal, marketing, sales, etc but if you're going to actually be in an executive role, you can't just be an expert in a narrow function, you actually have to understand the business as a whole. Businesses don't exist for technical work, technical work is done to make businesses successful.

Venkatesh Rao is both brilliant and hilarious but I don't see in your posts here that you understand what he was getting at with the Gervais principle and so on. FWIW, he's literally written about this exact thing:

https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/can-tech-die

Venkatesh Rao is also not really a fan of whatever it seems to be that you're advocating. He seems to think that Amazon is disproportionately successful compared to other tech peers because its decision making prioritizes business strategy over pleasing tech workers.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/venkate.../#12977f5a3bcb

K cool, we all know who JJ is, who the **** are you? Go nuts.

I don't know **** about google/amazon/microsoft/facebook etc. But although they're giant, they aren't the norm.

I work for AT&T, they're giant, the executives that manage the industry do not program and most of them never have. By and large they don't know what programming is, they think programmers are essentially interchangeable units etc. I don't know if they're the norm in industry either.

Most small companies I work for have been competently managed. Most of them had executives who know what's up, who have either worked directly as engineers or essentially either natively or through experience know how software development works. But I self selected these companies so I don't know if they're normal either. 100% of them ended up getting acquired by larger companies and that almost always spelled my exit.

This pretty much. The point of the book is that there are companies that exist like he describes. How many? Who knows. Are there great places for devs to work at? Of course there are.

The original comment was scoped to the software industry. To then claim that the largest companies in that industry (which also happen to be the largest companies in the world) aren’t the norm requires more than one counter example.

And it’s not like the companies I mentioned are the only ones. I suspect the majority of companies that have gone public have at least one technical founder, often multiple. And so on.

Obviously there are companies that don’t. Older companies are probably more likely to not have engineering based leadership (for lots of sensible reasons). But I think it’s silly to think these companies are the state of the software industry.

This isn't about big vs small and mostly about tech vs non-tech. AT&T is not a tech company. If software engineering is a company's core competency, then you're going to have a feedback loop that results in 1) software engineers being more empowered and better compensated, 2) being able to recruit better software engineers (across all dimensions including things like the ability to understand the business) 3) your software engineers (or those adjacent to the function) become business leaders, which continue the cycle.

On the other hand, if you don't do this, you end up with a cycle like: 1) software engineers are being marginalized and poorly compensated, 2) being unable to recruit the best people for software engineering 3) business leaders come primarily from other functions due to talent deficit and with subpar management, not enough concentration of top people and lack of focus, tech is unable to create substantial value, which continues the cycle.

I'm not sure the exact definition, but I feel like AT&T is a tech company?

I used to say something like Silicon Valley style software companies to refer to this but at this point "Tech" is the most frequently used term. I quoted this earlier but seems worth repeating:

https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/can-tech-die

That business people is good to business and not necessary good to software development

Ok, nice you put that here, I need to read it through, but me finding accurate the gervais principle doesn't mean I should agree with this. I need to understand what a technologist is for him. And it doesn't mean that if they are on the driver's seat is good for software industry.

Also this note

"We’re starting to enter the middle of the football now, with Tech losing ground to Everybody Else. Some pieces of Tech have skipped the middle entirely and landed straight in the endgame, with bankers and politicians vying for agency."

Just to try to close the point I try to make, I don't think it just about tech or not

Because even in tech companies you see things like this:

Developers are always going to the bottom of the organization hierarchy
They make ridicule career paths (SE I, SE II, SE III, SE Senior, SE Lead and so on)
They put layers of management over developers
Poorly executed agile methodologies
They divide the roles of a developer, where you have a business expert and some cases architect type roles where they are the real experts. And some extreme cases they have testing roles
Tight, fixed and arbitrary deadlines to meet business demand, this is what in the book is called "delivery trap" and this leads to a lot of problems

Imo these points make life of developers miserable, and I've lived all of them

Developers work better with autonomy, where they know a heart the business model, where they aren't been micromanaged.
And I don't see how the big ones make things better,even if the have some tech roles at the top, because improving the points I mention would go against at how organizations work

DontGoft,

There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding here and I don't have time to go over each point, but the main point I want to make is that if you work for a business, you're expected to be a business person that prioritizes business value over most other things. This is independent of function - for example, a marketer that thinks marketing decisions should be made based on how good they are for marketing, not how much business value marketing can bring to the business, shouldn't be in a role making important marketing decisions.

To the extent you're not, you shouldn't be trusted with important decisions - with autonomy comes the responsibility to care about the impact beyond your immediate circumstances. Contrary to the claims of disaffected tech workers, I'd argue that the most common form of dysfunction with respect to technical matters, especially in non-tech but also in tech, is having technical leaders that are out of touch with business realities making bad business decision based on technical excuses. I've worked for a long time both in tech and non-tech and my general sense is that tech people at tech companies are far more likely to pragmaticlaly consider the business consequences of their work, while tech people at non-tech companies tend to be much more dogmatic about doing the right technical things without consideration for business outcomes.

What I'm reading between the lines here is that you want the power to make important decisions, but without accountability. Assuming a well-functioning org, if you want to make important business decisions, you need to demonstrate that you have the ability to take into account all relevant aspects of the business reality to make these decisions and ultimately own the business consequences of your decisions. If you're successfully able to do this, congrats, you're now a business person.

My company is a case study on developers turned managers being bad at business. I think developers generally make terrible managers, in my limited experience.

There's a selection bias here - good developers that can manage well (or even have a track record that looks like they can do this well) are worth a lot in the market, so if your company doesn't offer similar levels of compensation, you're not going to have anyone decent. My personal experience (working in both tech and and non-tech companies and also in tech and non-tech roles) is that managers with engineering backgrounds at top tech companies tend to be good managers and compare well to managers in other functions. Also nearly all eng managers without a serious engineering background that I've encountered are terrible - it's just impossible for them to keep anyone accountable because their own understanding is so limited.

Yeah, I think Engineers can make great managers and like CB said, this is particularly true of managers of other engineers or managers in companies where engineering drives most of the business value.

But really, people probably tend towards being bad at management. So I suppose there’s truth to any “X tend to be bad managers” statement. Just in an absolute sense and not relative.

Well, I don't think what I want matters too much, world isn't going to change and I can't solve it neither.

But in a way I think developers should be more empowered, work closer to the business, because right know I think they have accountability.

If a developer makes a technical mistake or the wrong implementation that affect in a negative way to the business,
He/She is responsible for that, and the company lets him/her go or even, in worst case, sues him/her.
I don't know the legal details but there was a case where Volkswagen's CEO blames software developers for emissions cheating.

No but they develop software and that development is managed. For grins I looked up the largest companies in the world in terms of:

— Employees (Walmart in the private sector)
— Revenue (Walmart)
— Total profits (Saudi Aramco)

Then searched for open positions in software development at these companies. They hire people to do software development. Banks, oil companies, retail outfits, etc. all do software development and of course it is managed. World GDP is $80 trillion or so. Lots of business entities, lots of software being developed.

For grins I looked up the CTO of Walmart: https://corporate.walmart.com/leadership/suresh-kumar

Hmm.... sure looks like an executive that has programmed in the past and has a very technical background.

I'm going to skip Saudi Aramco, because I don't think anyone actually believes they're part of the software industry in any meaningful way. It's like saying my local Mom and Pop convenience store is part of the Finance industry because they have a book keeper.

This convo got kind of weird lol. The book doesn't really talk about tech experience in leadership, like at all

It doesn’t. Pointing out that the largest companies in the world product focus is not necessarily related to selling software products is definitely not a commentary on the background/qualifications of who manages their technological development.

Quote:

You're moving the goal posts like 30 yards (and still wrong). A whole bunch of executives of the worlds biggest companies have a programming / engineering background. The idea that these people have "never programmed" is absurd. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple (I think?), and so on... These companies were generally built with the executive team being tightly involved in the technical side of things - often even as the company grew to a significant size.

Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple by a lot of measures are not the largest companies in the world. Amazon arguably is, it employs a lot of people. Walmart, as just one example, didn’t follow the same growth path. Fairly certain Sam Walton didn’t do much programming. Talk about moving the goal posts.

Adios, I know you can’t resist disagreeing with clear truths. Market cap is a fairly well accepted measure of the biggest companies in the world. But whatever this isn’t a meaningful part of the argument. Go re-read the sentence where this digression started. It’s about the background of the executives of the software industry.

Walmart, when it was founded, wasn’t part of the software industry. It’s arguably still not, but I thought I’d avoid that because it doesn’t matter since it’s still a counter example of what what’s his name was saying. It’s not a company where the executives have never programmed or have no history of programming.

I think I would prefer to be in R&D despite needing to support it. likewise with greenfield. like, its better to build stuff even if you need to support it rather than just supporting other people code. thats the worst in my short experience.

ya this is beyond a red flag. like, you should be updating linkedin today.

you wont. I think you may just need your confidence pumped up a bit. I surely did when it was time to interview. but its pretty clear you interview really well and have great ability to relate to people in a face to face setting.

are you worried about the technical part? if so, then you need to study up on all those algorithmns. theres tons of training sites and books.

but I am not sure how much you would need to white board if this is your goal. honestly, I really dont know how realistic this is with your background but since you have been leading a team from a business/project perspective, I dont see why you couldnt apply for a bunch of Project Manager type jobs.

one thing is that I think it may be hard to get a job where you run a team/project and get to code a lot. I could be way wrong but I thought those work streams are often segregated. and most companies put the lead/architect/technical solutions dev closer to those roles if they do have a technical bent. it may be better to go for the management role and then try to shoehorn in some dev work. or look for opportunities to do your own small dev project for the company while managing a team.

but heres the thing, you wont know until you try so you might as well start firing off your resume. or just open up linkedin, I get recruiters nearly every day and Im not even looking.

Pretty much every company makes software. Esp the big ones.

I think I’ll get a little more industry experience before I take a crack at managing again, I’m not very good at it

"it's is led by high executives that never have programmed and don't know how to program." ?

Ok I said this, I can accept my mistake (I have no problem doing so): some of them have programmed.

Actualy the book says this:

But I said it because I feel it in a certain way, because in order to be a CTO you don't need to make your career about programming, your career has to be about management.
There are project managers with technical background, but never have worked like programmers. And, for most companies, they could be valid CTO candidates, specially in large companies.