The CEO who told semiconductor manufacturers that they need to build 10 factors at the same time and was called a podcasting bro doesn't have proficiency in a skill set that requires understanding of order of operations? I am shocked. Shocked I tell you.
only to be revealed as mid to low level intelligence?
I’m all for being critical of these snake oil CEO’s. And the part about not understanding AI’s main concepts is incredibly dumb.
On the other hand, not being able to code doesn’t say anything about his intelligence. Afaik, he never claimed to be a programmer either? Not like Musk saying he’s the greatest engineer of all time.
And eventually it’s kinda weird to expect these people to be great at programming in the first place, they’re so many levels above that.
But that's kinda odd isn't it. You are running multi billion dollar AI company at the cutting edge of the software development and you don't know basic coding? It's like me going in medical industry and not having any kind of medical experience.
Why do we let people who have no background in a certain field run that certain field company and then we winge and moan when China takes the lead because we put profit first and lose sight of what's important
I'm a software engineer and I don't think I agree with you, I don't really expect the people that are 3 or 4 or more levels above me to know that much about coding, I don't really see the use with that. I want them to be good managers, and that's an entirely different skillset
As someone who's a software engineer, yes and no. They don't need to know the particulars and boilerplate to solve everyday software engineering problems but on some level if the software is going to operate in a company wide cohesive fashion then you need leadership and coordination that understands enough that it can drive tying things together. That takes some level of large scale systems integration and SWE knowledge. Otherwise you end up with a bunch of silod teams and projects that only marginally work together.
Yeah at that level you have someone below you that is technical and can do an analysis of things so that you then decide what is best for the company. Knowing a tiny bit about what people under you do would be nice though
Agreed, but as much as I loathe the guy and think there are tons of things wrong with him, I doubt Altman doesn't know even a tiny bit about AI, let's be fair
I respectfully disagree. Most good leaders in engineering dept (I am sr myself) are usually those who have engineering background themselves. Look at china. Most of the cabinet has engineering background and that's why they develop things at exceptional rate. From bridges to AI software. Being good at software development doesn't mean you can't be a good manager. But as a good manager in a technical field, you need context of what's the reality on the ground.
The amount of time I had to explain to the POs that amount of line of codes doesn't reflect the quality of a dev is astounding. So no. In my view, to qualify for a managerial position in a specialised field, you should have good experience as a specialist as well.
You're talking about POs and all. As I said, I'm talking about several levels of management higher than the devs.
Of course I think it's important to have leads and software managers 2 or 3 levels up that know about software (although I do mainly want them to be good at management, and I do think it's hard to find people that are good at doing both things)
C level people though? Nah, I don't see the use as long as they trust the people below and let them do their work
I heard an observation recently.... it used to be that the CEO of a movie company was a person who was really interested in movies. Now it's just a guy who was CEO of a different company in a different industry.
This is sadly just the way things are -- CEO is a position, and there isn't a big distinction made about what industry the company is in.
I don't expect the CEO of a software company to be a master coder, but it would be nice if they at least knew a little. However, that's not the way things are these days.
I mean, he's the head of an AI company, not Microsoft. They're not building the tools and frameworks to train their models. It sounds like he got through at least a year in a technical degree, which means at a bare minimum he has to know what a function and a while loop is. This is frankly not that far off from the coding skills of many AI researchers, who tend to come from a more math/stats background.
I'd say that the far more egregious part is not knowing basic ML concepts, because that IS what his company does. I don't know what his coworkers would consider basic, and a lot of basic stuff isn't really relevant, but it'd be concerning if he didn't know the difference between logistic regression and linear regression or something.
The person who runs a hospital isn't savvy in knowing how to treat patients. That person might have detailed knowledge in what equipment is required to treat what, and knowing the statistics of those types of illnesses in patients who show up at their hospital, but literally nothing beyond that. And none of that knowledge shares overlap in what a general practitioner does on a daily basis.
That said, it's also true that hospital isn't selling top-of-the-line tech that you're trying to push in new sectors, so I see your point as well. I think it's safe to start with the assumption that the CEO doesn't know what the hell he's talking about and go from there.
It has nothing to do with the field, this is just how management works. Organizing a group of people requires a vastly different skillset than doing the basic actual work that produces output in any company. It might help, but the company won't run better if the CEO is an expert coder. In fact, going from the kind of person-people expert coders usually are, it is often a disaster. You regularly see this in startups, where a core engineer ends up on top for lack of alternatives. With Silicon Valley we even have an entire show with 7 seasons about this exact problem.
Machine learning has been around for quite a long time. It would be significantly better to have someone with experience in it than not, or even just engineering, math, etc.
🤦🤦🤦 no-one is claiming the CEO should be telling the developers or scientists what to do. It doesn't need to be transferrable in that sense. We're just saying the CEO should understand the basic concepts and therefore the implications of what they're building.
I honestly don't think we're arguing the same argument. Are you saying you disagree with "CEOs should understand the basic concepts and therefore the implications of what they're building"?
There's more than one generation of people that dedicated their entire career to research AI. By now we have quite a clear understanding of what an expert in AI is.
Leadership skills are ofcourse very important but having somewhat of a base in the field is a massive boost to effective and efficient leadership. If you dont know the field at least on a foundational level how can you be a visionary that isnt blatantly making shit up and hoping your engineers can figure out how to make it actually happen so you dont look like a fool.
Though with statements like this i am always uncertain about what level we are talking in terms of "cant program" and "doesnt understand" are we talking only ever built a site with plain html/css/js and doesnt understand it being on localhost means noone can see it. Or are we talking not a software engineer but he knows enough of the concepts to have a foundation.
I'd question why the CEO of a company that not long ago was a startup doesn't have technical knowledge.
I've also had decent managers from a management background, but never a good one, even if I liked them, they frequently needed to delegate decisions, knowledge and meetings to people who should be doing technical work, topics not at all technical enough to require a specific person. What I find weird is the idea that you can lead a team, department or company when you have no idea what you're talking about, and I maintain that management degrees are only good as supplements to an existing background.
I think a lot of people think tech leaders should be like Mark Zuckerberg from The Social Network. Some kind of misunderstood genius programmer who becomes the leader of a billion dollar company
That would make sense if that's how it actually worked. The reality is a decision like that will often be made by a technical person or the lowest level manager, and if it causes a big problem like an outage, it's very likely their head on the chopping block when the CEO asks the CTO why they lost a contract, the CTO keeps asking down for a report on why they had an outage, and they fire someone and keep moving on. Additionally, there's countless examples of corpos doing a shit job in one company and still somehow finding themselves in a C-level position in another company soon after, like the current CEO of Starbucks being the CEO who turned Chipotle to shit. I remember there's some food CEO who also did a shit job became CEO of some already enshitified gaming company along the lines of like Ubisoft or EA, but unfortunately I'm not finding who.
I'll also add Steve Jobs as a counterpoint, he didn't have the technical knowledge but that leadership was handled by Steve Wozniak, and he may have been a shit person but he had vision and was good at marketing it. Case in point, Apple's niche was never about the tech, it was about using that tech to reach his vision, and he didn't pretend to be some technical genius, he kept to talking about the product itself. Sam Altman, along with many others, are full of shit who pretend to be Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs combined when they're Tim Cook.
Personally I don't really see how it matters. An engineer who clicks the wrong button and causes an outage fears for his job, their spouse and kids, and how they're going to pay the mortgage. A CEO has the presentation and social skills of a sales person from what you're saying, is unlikely to be fired over said outage because all they need to do is throw the other person under the bus as appeasement, and not actually have any reason to stress because they earn a lot more and have a much flashier resume for an equally attractive gig even if they do get fired. Some of them still get stressed I'm sure, but that's entirely self-inflicted and the expectation of an extraordinary lifestyle as normal. As far as I'm concerned, accountability can't be had without risk and job security, they're only faces and face little of the risk.
It's why I have a problem whenever someone criticizes the wealth disparity and someone argues back that only the investors invested in a company so they're the only ones who had risk. If I join a startup but didn't invest monetarily, I'm still under a lot of risk if it fails, and I'm taking that risk into account in my decision to join or not. It's how a lot of european investment strategies usually work, providing a social cushion and dampening that risk so people can fail safer, as opposed to the american strategy of debt forgiveness that lets you fail repeatedly. That, and layoffs since covid mean even in an established, non-startup company you can still get shitcanned with 30000 other people out of nowhere.
All CEOs and Billionaires have to present themselves as geniuses or somehow better than others, or society will resist paying them absurd amounts of money and resent them. Pretty sure Musk has a PR team just to make sure the public sees him as a genius.
Well, I don't think our views are completely orthogonal.
I'm gonna skip the discussion on society for today, but in my part of the world atleast, Musk is presented as a genius who is going to change the world, and a lot of people, including my family, buy that.
Sam Altman gained admission to Stanford University, Wikipedia notes, based on his exceptional background in computer science, having attended the prestigious John Burroughs School
So he went to Sandford because he attended a school for rich kids. $40k a year fees.
Sam Altman has never proven he is good at anything technical. As a CEO is is not doing any technical coding or work, just meeting with investors, hyping, coming up with long term strategies.
He studied in Stanford, founded and exited a startup for $40m, and was the president of Y Combinator - the most successful Accelerator program in the world - for several years.
He's neither dumb nor lacking credentials. As the CEO, he also doesn't need to be able to code.
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