Yes, you would expect it, but it's still rather atypical; most people become CEOs because of their business and political acumen, whether or not they understand the technical bits is maybe 10th priority.
They say about companies that you can tell their culture from the outside by who they value and who they promote. Some engineering companies promote MBAs, and some promote engineers. Promotions and who holds high rank is an external cultural signal to the world that is really hard to fake.
This cuts both ways though: if you see a company that hires and promotes engineers, where the CEO is this technically deep, you can probably conclude that (a) they value engineering but also that (b) they're probably not that great in terms of financial management & project management.
They're radically different skill sets, and opportunity cost abounds. Almost no one is awesome at everything, because there are only 24 hours in the day, so being awesome at one thing often does mean you have some trading area where you're weak.
Engineering companies run by MBAs are not always so bad as they sound. It sucks as an engineer if your considerations are not always front and center, but you get other advantages too; better strategy/insight on fundraising, better overall management, and sometimes vision too, many engineers are too narrowly focused on incremental improvements, and are missing the "dreamer" component, aka the "Jobs" not the "Wozniak".
And how many MBAs are "dreamers"? Then again, i don't think Jobs was much of a dreamer either, he was just damn good at talking the talk.
If anyone was a dreamer it was Woz back then. Dreaming of having his own computer, dreaming about computers improving life for everyone, etc etc etc.
Jobs are all about appearance. And not just visual. He had a near pathological loathing towards fan noise for example. To the point that one AppleII variant had problems with excessive heat buckling the logicboard and unseating components because he refused the engineers to install even the most unobtrusive of fans.
I suspect we can see this in how he was quite hung up on the GUI but completely missed networked computers while touring Xerox PARC.
Job was all about design, and design for him went from the very simple, raw components to the final packaging and marketing. For him there was no boundary between engineering and design, between software and hardware, they were all part of the same product.
It's easy to dismiss his views as superficial, but when he wanted to have a board look a certain way, or for a case to be a certain size, he'd press for it. When there were technical problems that prevented that from happening he wanted to understand why. He wanted explanations, and he'd listen to them, then make his own judgement based on that information.
> ...but completely missed networked computers while touring Xerox PARC.
The Macintosh famously shipped with very high speed serial ports for that time, up to 230Kbaud, which was vastly faster than any modem or other serial device around in the 1980s. Why?
Apple may not have had Ethernet in their early computers, but they were absolutely aware about the importance of networking. Sending files from one Mac to another was as simple as plugging them together. While the Macintosh didn't have a lot of games, it did have multi-player ones over a local network long, long before Windows did.
>Job was all about design, and design for him went from the very simple, raw components to the final packaging and marketing. For him there was no boundary between engineering and design, between software and hardware, they were all part of the same product.
+1 Somebody who actually understands Apple and Steve.
An MBA doesn't teach you to be a dreamer. Neither does an engineering degree.
But consider what personality types are drawn to different businesses...and I think you'll find a larger (but still small) percentage of the dreamer type within the business community than within engineering.
This is not to say that there aren't also engineers who think this way, of course there are. It's more about demographics, and which personality type is attracted by which type of work.
> I think you'll find a larger (but still small) percentage of the dreamer type within the business community than within engineering.
Can you expound on that a little? It's completely contrary to my life experience, where people with business degrees are mostly system followers and ladder climbers.
I can't speak for moxious, but I agreed with their post because in my understanding of business and engineering and from being around people of either backgrounds, engineering seems to firstly prize hard, analytical skills and only later on considers creative solutions, while business gets around to analyzing things after considering the things within a/the bigger picture.
In terms of seeing the forest vs. the trees: My thought is that engineering might be so concerned with seeing and analyzing the trees that they do not get around to considering the forest as a whole and recognizing where no tree presently (but could eventually) resides within that forest. (I think that "recognizing where no tree presently resides" is what a dreamer type might do.)
A big issue that I see with framing business people in this light is that few of them do seem to think entrepreneurially, but that may explain why you haven't run into more dreamer types.
>that (b) they're probably not that great in terms of financial management & project management.
That's hardly a conclusion you can make at all. Only on the Internet could someone claim with a straight face that engineers as a rule are not also competent at financial and project management. There are millions of counterexamples. Further, engineers do on occasion go back to school to get MBA's and take a management track. Does that make them an engineer or a business person for purposes of this discussion?
They say about companies that you can tell their culture from the outside by who they value and who they promote. Some engineering companies promote MBAs, and some promote engineers. Promotions and who holds high rank is an external cultural signal to the world that is really hard to fake.
This cuts both ways though: if you see a company that hires and promotes engineers, where the CEO is this technically deep, you can probably conclude that (a) they value engineering but also that (b) they're probably not that great in terms of financial management & project management.
They're radically different skill sets, and opportunity cost abounds. Almost no one is awesome at everything, because there are only 24 hours in the day, so being awesome at one thing often does mean you have some trading area where you're weak.
Engineering companies run by MBAs are not always so bad as they sound. It sucks as an engineer if your considerations are not always front and center, but you get other advantages too; better strategy/insight on fundraising, better overall management, and sometimes vision too, many engineers are too narrowly focused on incremental improvements, and are missing the "dreamer" component, aka the "Jobs" not the "Wozniak".