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Programmers as CEOs

Joel reckons you have to be a programmer to run a software company because:

Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again.

I’m not sure that is such a great analogy. It almost brings up “nature vs. nurture” arguments. Loads of people have been taught by advisers how to surf reasonably well. Are all the great surfers naturals or did some get taught to be great?

Even so, is the business of a software company software or is it just business? Making deals, making profit, making contacts and alliances and selling, selling, selling. Generally the kind of stuff us programmers are pretty bad at.

Was Microsoft successful because Bill Gates wrote great code in the beginning or because he was just a shrewd businessman who saw something the business folk at IBM didn’t?

The best tech doesn’t always win, the best strategy though normally does win. Some technical understanding may form a better strategy but you need to have those strategic skills first to take advantage of the tech. From where I sit, the best CEOs have the best strategies, the best understanding of the market and the future. They don’t have to know about date format discrepancies between Excel and BASIC in 1900.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 11:47 am and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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    I suspect there *is* a subtle but crucial difference between lacking experience and lacking any real interest in the product... Remember when Apple was run by a guy who did real well selling softdrinks? Yeah...

    > Was Microsoft successful because Bill Gates wrote great code in the
    > beginning or because he was just a shrewd businessman who saw
    > something the business folk at IBM didn’t?

    As far as i'm aware, Gates *never* wrote /great/ code. He wrote code that got the job done, wrote it quickly, and surrounded himself with people who did the same. And i'm not sure why you'd put "just" in front of "shrewd businessman" - the history of the software industry is filled with companies and products that died due to the lack of people who could get things done, whether that was writing the software or selling the software.

    You can have one or the other and be yet another mediocre organization. The ones that go further are the ones that have *both*, and both know their jobs, and both *do* their jobs, and each leaves the other to his specialty.

    Then again, there's SAP...

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