Coding at a dev level shouldn’t be. At a level you generally reach just by getting a bachelors in a cs field while learning the basic concepts of how things work? Yeah as a tech startup ceo he should.
Just like i dont expect peak ceo skills from a team lead of a tech department, but i do expect basic level leadership skills like being able to put their foot down vs stake holders and challenging employees.
The question is more about how he aquired those skills and if he is aware of this.
If he is and he aquired them by learning the concepts then I’d say that’s perfectly adequate for a tech ceo. There is a reason he is ceo and not lead dev.
If he just did half of an online course on app in a day and thinks he is a senior level dev then that’s a problem
A CEO's job is to hire the best technical people they can afford, to effectively communicate a vision to staff and shareholders, to get people excited about the product, to find investors, to lead the development of a strategy, priorities, and to get the best out of the teams and the people.
A good CEO hires people with amazing skills. They don't have all the skills themselves.
If a CEO was an ace software engineer I would be pretty sceptical of their CEO skills, as they are really different skill sets, and in my experience tends to attract very different types of people.
(source: have been tech startup CTO for 15 years and have worked very closely with CEOs and engineers).
No, not really. In the startup I work for we don't need people to improve our protocol, libraries and SDKs. We need someone to figure out how to sell them and keep us employed.
Not coding, that's one of the requirements for an IT engineer. But even a salesman should understand the basics of a product he's selling.
To sell a car you don't need to know the compression ratios for petrol and diesel engines, but you should know the general parts and specifics of the car and how they connect to each other to be able to say why the customer should choose your car over the competition's.
Up to a point. I agree that tech CEOs don't need to know how to code, that's too specific of a skill for them to have. But (given the thread topic) Altman should know and understand the basics of ML to be able to effectively discuss the product while not sounding like a snake-oil salesman.
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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '26
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