
Why are CEOs failing software engineers? - kag0
https://iism.org/article/why-are-ceos-failing-software-engineers-56
======
jedberg
I'm surprised they didn't look at Walt Disney for how to run a successful
creative company. His ideas apply equally well to software as they do to the
arts.

I've been watching the documentaries on Disney+, particularly The Imagineering
Story (great doc BTW). They talk about the history of the creative side of
Disneyland.

What you learn is that when they are simply given a budget and told "build"
they thrive. When a CFO type gets involved with Disney, suddenly their output
drops, because that CEO is asking what the ROI is for everything they do. A
lot of what they do fails and has no ROI, and the people that work there start
to worry about what their ROI will be before they start working.

When the CEO just says "We're going to spend X% on research, here is the
budget" then they thrive again.

I think this is applicable to software. When an engineer isn't asked to think
about the ROI ahead of time, they are left free to come up with novel
innovations. But if they know they will be judged on ROI, they will take fewer
risks.

This of course is all predicated on being a profitable company. You have to
already have a good cashflow to have the freedom to say "just go create".

~~~
save_ferris
Within the last 5-10 years, Disney outsourced entire technology divisions
using the H1-B visa program and forced employees to train their replacements
for their last 90 days or forgo severance.

A former Disney IT employee testified before Congress, at times crying while
he recounted the experience of being let go and having to personally train his
replacement.[0]

Whatever Walt Disney was doing back in the day doesn't seem to apply anymore,
at least based on your description of what a successful creative company looks
like. To me, this looks ruthless and manipulative.

0: [https://www.computerworld.com/article/3038292/former-
disney-...](https://www.computerworld.com/article/3038292/former-disney-it-
worker-to-congress-how-can-you-allow-this.html)

~~~
throwaway86442
Throwaway because I wouldn't be surprised if Disney retaliated because of this
post.

As a person who recently joined the Disney org not by choice, I wouldn't wish
Disney on my worst enemies. Seems like OP bought into Disney's propaganda
hook, line, and sinker.

Take the CFO types example and dial that to 19. You can't even buy a sandwich
without Disney corporate asking for the ROI of it. Want to use a different
programming language? An OSS library? A SASS vendor? Please get approvals from
legal and finance with ROI estimates. Nevermind the yearly dance to justify
why engineers you already have should still stay on payroll. Contracts and
employment are cancelled by default at the end of the year unless management
makes a case on ROI for every head. Software projects to them are like movies,
once it's "done", the people involved can kindly fuck right off.

This isn't just limited to the technology side, I have friends throughout the
creative side in both film and parks divisions. Every hour of their time has
to be accounted for and approved up the management chain, every project must
be forecast with sufficient ROI before start, and will be cancelled without
notice the moment it there's a hint of missing expectations.

Even getting a H1-B replacement is luxury that you have to fight for. H1-B is
still more expensive than a contractor in a developing country under one of
Disney's international divisions.

The magic of Disney is the boatloads of people who continue to _want_ to work
for Disney despite all this.

~~~
eastbayjake
> Want to use a different programming language? An OSS library? A SASS vendor?
> Please get approvals from legal and finance with ROI estimates.

This is true of all of enterprise IT though. It's not due to "CFO types"
getting involved, it's just part of operating at scale in a public company
where your tool choices have an impact on long-term support and
governance/controls. I don't begrudge technologists who are chafed by this,
but it's inherent to the category and not particular to a single corporate
entity.

~~~
DarthGhandi
Found this comment really strange, I work at a far smaller company and not
only would they ask that they'd be laughing at me the whole time while doing
it. These aren't the sort of things even nimble companies take lightly and
without a lot of discussion and review.

~~~
throwaway86442
These would be things that would have to be escalated to an SVP or above to be
brought to an equivalent on the business side. In just about every company
I've had experience with, these type of decisions stay within engineering and
rarely need to involve lower executives.

------
Spooky23
Interesting but weird.

CEO's aren't failing software engineers, no more than software engineers are
failing the cafeteria crew by using too much ketchup.

If they are failing, they are failing the business. There's evidence of
significant problems in business/management philosophy, as the consensus is
that you need to optimize for now, and later is somebody else's problem. That
has nothing to do with software engineers.

Technology people sometimes get this worldview that they are the sun, and the
universe revolves around them. Hate to break the news, but no.

~~~
acidbaseextract
_There 's evidence of significant problems in business/management philosophy,
as the consensus is that you need to optimize for now, and later is somebody
else's problem._

Dead on. I've seen boards of directors ask for fried ice:

Management: We haven't put adequate time into building a sales training
program.

Board: Focus only on revenue this quarter. It's the only thing that matters!

Then next quarter:

Board: Why aren't your new sales guys producing?! They need to drive revenue!

Management: Uh... you told us not to spend time on training.

~~~
nicoburns
Indeed. Ultimately it's the (specific incarnation of the) shareholder model of
capitalism that's at fault. Shareholders have ultimate control of companies,
and their incentives are aligned all wrong (to the short term).

~~~
frenchy
Ultimately, "long-sighted" shareholders should be able to outperform the
short-sited ones, as long as they can retain control of the company. I wonder
if there's any way to form a sort of shareholders union to maintain the
control of an organization by shareholders who plain to keep stock for a long
time.

~~~
cbhl
The two-class stock structure (ala Facebook and Google) is one experiment in
this, but being able to establish such a structure depends on investors'
appetite for it during IPO-time.

------
m23khan
I don't know solution for the entire IT industry but can suggest something for
Corporate IT:

New IT staff should be given grounding in Business Curriculum relevant to the
Corporate's business / Team's mandate - this ought to organized by upper level
of IT management.

Software Developers / Engineers working in Corporate IT tend to stagnate in
terms of their careers once they hit the wall (wall = business knowledge).

E.g., take an investment firm and within it, say IT Department XYZ Supports
the firm's Private Equity investment team. It is easy for Software Engineers
in the team to code up and provide Tech. solutions however for complex
business cases where advanced Private Equity knowledge is required, the
Software Engineers have to rely on the Business Analysts or the clients
themselves to do hand-holding.

I have only seen something like 1 in 10 Software Developers in Corporate IT
willing to pick up Business knowledge beyond the basic business terminology.
And this is why I believe the value of Software Engineers at Corporate IT
takes a serious hit - from CEO / Board / Upper layers of Finance, it looks
like the drivers of revenue are basically their finance folks (CFAs, CPAs,
Investors) whereas IT are just a cost center to enable the finance folks to do
their work (which is a very bad vision but that is how it looks like from
their POV). In these cases, the only group from IT that benefits somewhat are
the top IT management who act as the guardians of the IT division.

Another thing that works against IT folks in Corporate IT is self-criticism
(critical of current IT culture, constant itch to reinvent self), constant
need to associate with low-paid/ low-educated professions (factory line worker
analogy, plumber mentality) and appearing far too casual. Sure, jeans and
T-shirts and having eccentric/artistic personality is the culture spawned from
Tech stalwarts based in Silicon Valley, but that mentality does not translate
into rest of the World. Even if the Corporate's HR policies allows for dress-
down environment, guess what - the HR and Finance People typically appear well
polished in their appearance - they rather have nice office lunch rather than
pizza and pop chow-downs and you can't deny that as humans (especially if the
CEO and top Execs are non-IT), it doesn't leave a very favorable opinion about
the IT staff.

~~~
dpeck
It’s not just software, it’s like that for every industry. There are some,
usually large, group of people whether in sales/marketing/operations/etc who
aren’t particularly interested in the industry of their business but prefer to
focus on the details of their task.

It’s not wrong or bad at all, but it does tend to be compensated less.

------
opportune
I don’t really like the idea that Need, Belief, Opportunity, and Anticipation
are the drivers of engineering as opposed to money and personal growth. I’m
not surprised though because these guys appear to be Scrum Consultants who
want to tell software orgs they can improve productivity by paying them for
“training” rather than paying employees more for work.

Ultimately what I want as a software engineer employee is my own personal
success. I actually identify a lot more with their “Business Management” step:
I want incentives to be aligned and I will be motivated to do great work if I
feel like I can share in that success. Yes it’s easier to get up in the
morning if I’m working on something that’s overall successful, but that would
be negated if I couldn’t get a piece of that.

This seems to fit into the more common trope that engineers are easily fooled
into working for less pay than they should be getting through bullshit like
“vision”. Even if I’m working on something cool I’m not going to be happy to
just make someone else rich. If I only cared about solving a problem I would
just write OSS.

~~~
devdas
Your personal motivation appears to be entirely extrinsic. For a lot of
people, the motivation is intrinsic.

After a certain amount of money, more money wouldn't bring me joy. Money is a
floor, not a ceiling.

~~~
kag0
I used to think this about myself (and I do still think money is a floor, not
a ceiling). But I've come to realize that there are two monetary thresholds
for me. A lower threshold after which more money doesn't bring me more joy,
and a higher one (which is the real floor) which is compensation compared to
others/the industry/the area. Although I try not to think this way, it's hard
to feel recognized or appreciated when my compensation is much lower than
others.

------
YesThatTom2
Yes, CEOs are. That's why I wrote:

The Top 10 Things Executives Should Know About Software

[https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2019/7/237712-the-
top-10-thin...](https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2019/7/237712-the-
top-10-things-executives-should-know-about-software/fulltext)

~~~
AtlasBarfed
Executives are shockingly idiotic about software development, and considering
their business sinks or swims on the success of software in very very many
cases, it is a major failing of MBA factories.

I actually consider software / IT management to be more important than
accounting, and every MBA person takes finance/accounting.

------
compumike
I enjoyed this article very much. I'd add that if you truly want the freedom
to be creative, you may have to opt out of being an employee and choose the
founder path instead. This nicely compliments pg's "You Weren't Meant to Have
a Boss" essay:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html)

~~~
zomglings
I opted out of being an employee and chose the founder path. I have very
little time to be creative (the way I was, for example, when I was in graduate
school or at Google).

For me, a large part of thinking creatively is about exposing myself to ideas
outside of what I am actively supposed to be doing and then letting those
ideas permeate through my thinking when I am working on what I am actively
supposed to be doing.

Between talking to users, talking to customers, talking to investors, and
perpetual catch-up on my product, I rarely find the space to think about
things other than my business.

That said, we have definitely had dark moments that we came out of because of
very creative ideas. It's just that creativity is nowhere near the top virtue
required of a founder.

~~~
jimbokun
I know Bill Gates had his "think week", where he would block off an entire
week every year to just read books and think.

Maybe you could do something similar? I'm sure you are very busy, but so was
he.

~~~
zomglings
Thanks for the suggestion, didn't know about think weeks. Love the idea, and
reading is the thing that I miss most - used to read a LOT before moving to
the Bay Area. These days, not so much.

At the very least, a think weekend. :)

------
alexashka
There is no reason to have a happy workforce when an unhappy workforce will
do.

It's hard work keeping people engaged, everyone wants a different carrot.
Everyone understands and fears the stick and it's easy to hire for - can you
threaten people with a stick? Yes? Hired :)

We live in a wage slavery society with fewer jobs than there are people, _on
purpose_.

It's not that CEOs are failing software engineers, it's that the current
system of beliefs humans hold in sum, seems to be failing humanity as a whole
(but then again, if we think this way, has it ever _not_ failed humanity?).
Consider children digging through trash for food while billionaires fine dine
discussing AI and space travel. I don't know what them rich folks believe, but
it's inconsiderate of most of humanity's pain it seems.

------
nickff
This post is atrociously bad. It seems like the author(s) are trying to come
up with original ideas, but Steve Blank and Clayton Christensen have written
much better works on this subject.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I agree it is poorly presented, which is why having others read and critique
something is always helpful. That said, I don't believe it rises to the level
of 'atrociously bad' :-).

The authors will come by and read this and dismiss it out of hand when you
have a chance to help them get better at what they do (they recognize that
failing to do something, in this case present their case clearly, can teach
new skills)

So let's be a bit more proactive in the feedback okay?

The post bounces between background/foundation material and new material too
rapidly. It can be over expository in background which may prevent the reader
from connecting what background material/situation is being addressed by the
new material. It fails to present a cogent summary of its thesis statement in
the first paragraph, that comes in paragraph 3. Paragraphs 1 & 2 are nominally
a problem statement in what reads as an obtuse jargon.

Now some of that is that the entire article feels like it is written for
someone who has read all of their other articles and so there are many
unexplained phrases which clearly have specific meanings. Statements like _" I
promise you, in its entirety, the following is something you’ve never heard
before, and the ramifications of ignoring the advice herein most assuredly
leads to unhappy software engineers."_ exhibit a certain hubris that can be
off putting to engineers and that isn't a great place to start.

------
ChipSkylark
Large corporations like Amazon offset tax liability with tax credits from huge
R&D expenditures [1], and those can be "moonshots" or highly innovative
products that change the world. The famous CEOs quoted in this article take
full advantage of this and there is definitely room to get creative with how
that money is spent.

A friend of mine working at <large tech megacorp> told me that it is not
uncommon for them to assign product/eng teams to build novel, competing
solutions to the same problem or product space, sometimes without even knowing
about the existence of the other team(s).

Similarly, I've heard <other large tech megacorp> sends the green college new
grads out to hack together products and innovate with new ideas as quickly as
possible, and once they find product market fit, they hand over the project to
the seasoned senior engineers to build it out at global scale.

These anecdotes might just be hearsay BS, but it does make me think: how
creative can you get with R&D and who makes those decisions? In what ways do
the CEO/CFOs play a constructive role in this process?

[1] [https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/17204004/amazon-research-
develo...](https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/17204004/amazon-research-development-
rd)

------
lkrubner
This article focuses on work-processes and thought-processes that can be
thought of as clear, explicit, rational, and goal-oriented. That's an
important topic, and I found the article interesting, if a little long.

They define Creative Management like this:

" _Creative management is one of three dominant forms of value management. Its
purpose is to establish a system of management that enables and motivates
creative staff, such as software engineers, writers, designers and artists, to
discover and realize new works of value._ "

It's an interesting thesis, but there a subtle nuance here, I think, which I
would put like this:

For every clear, explicit, rational, and goal-oriented form of management,
there are degenerate irrational forms, and Creative Management is more
vulnerable to degenerate irrational forms than other forms of management.

Over the years, many of my blogs posts have gotten a lot of discussion on
Hacker News, so some of you might remember my focus on irrational, destructive
forms of management. In my book How To Destroy A Tech Startup (
[https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-
eboo...](https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-
ebook/dp/B0772FJQ1T/) ) I give details about two different startups that go
off the rails because of the ego-driven nature of the decision making by top
leaders.

But the point I'd like to make now is, compared to older management systems,
which were somewhat more amenable to data modeling and feedback analysis,
Creative Management opens the door to creativity, but also wish-fulfillment
fantasy. (As a point of comparison, think about W. Edwards Deming and his very
methodical statistical approach to reducing errors in a factory, and compare
that to much more open ended process of inventing, say for instance, a sui
generis interface.)

Please note, I'm not saying Creative Management is a bad concept, but I am
saying it has large pitfalls for which we do not yet have standard answers.

Having said all that, there are some good books that have really looked at
failures in the world of software, and ways the process can be improved. The
books of Robert Glass are excellent, and I've posted a long excerpt of one of
my favorite of his stories here:

[http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-worst-software-
proj...](http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-worst-software-project-
failure-ever)

~~~
jacques_chester
As an aside, I read your book some time back and found it compelling.

------
gtallen1187
Interesting perspective.

Note to author: it might be worth moving the "How are CEOs failing software
engineers?" section to the beginning of the article. With a title like "Why
are CEOs failing software engineers?", the first thing i want to know is _how_
the CEOs are failing. Only afterwards do i care about the _why_. This felt a
bit like i was thrown head-first into a new framework for classifying types of
management before I could figure out whether or not I wanted to learn about
it.

Aside from the structure, really interesting piece!

------
danesparza
Classically trained CEO's don't use the language of makers. They use language
that describes cashflow, savings, and debt. They are accountants at heart (who
are beholden to shareholders -- not their employees).

Just look at the language used to describe a successful CEO 'sprinter' by
Harvard Business Review ([https://hbr.org/2018/01/the-fastest-path-to-the-ceo-
job-acco...](https://hbr.org/2018/01/the-fastest-path-to-the-ceo-job-
according-to-a-10-year-study)) :

"In his late twenties, “James” was hired in a strategy and business
development role inside a multibillion-dollar marketing and communications
business. Early in his career, he was offered the chance to build out one of
the new businesses. It felt like a demotion, or at best a lateral move, to be
handed a blank org chart and a highly uncertain future. “It was zero revenue
when I stepped in, and we built that business to $250 million,” he says. By
building a new business from scratch, he picked up essential management
skills, such as running a P&L, managing a budget, and setting a strategic
vision — all critical prerequisites to becoming a CEO (over 90% of the CEOs we
studied had general management experience). Thirteen years later, he found
himself the CEO of a $1.5 billion education and training business."

~~~
otoburb
>> _They use language that describes cashflow, savings, and debt._

Without such language and understanding, founders will have a harder time
sustaining their endeavours. Such concepts apply whether you're bootstrapping,
taking investor funds, or just an indie builder.

------
kevstev
As someone with 3/4 of their foot in management and one foot in the hands-on
world, I am often surprised at how my viewpoint changes when thinking about
the bigger picture. As an example, one of the things I personally own still as
an individual is essentially our kafka platform- that means our actual brokers
operations, our automation, monitoring, client availability, etc.

We provided a really nice walkthrough to get you going as a quickstart. The
whole point was originally to keep it simple so that you have to be thoughtful
about the settings and tradeoffs you make in terms of reliability vs
performance. I didn't want to be overly prescriptive in what and how teams use
functionality like transactions and idempotence.

But we find, time and again, people get this wrong. They don't look at things
like delivery reports, they don't set timeouts that make sense, they often
don't even think about their replication factor. I pushed against full fledged
client examples because there really isn't a one size fits all and I didn't
want people to copy and paste without thinking about what they are doing.

The reality is, I am fighting a war on drugs. People want things to Just Work,
and don't have the time to sit down for a day or two and read a book on kafka
concepts (which we provide for free) and just want to get things done. We will
repeatedly be involved in "outages" because clients could not tolerate a
broker restarting and they did not configure their apps to be resilient.

On a more topical note, a guy on my team wanted to rewrite a python app we
have in kotlin about 2 years ago, because it was the hot thing for about 5
minutes and our little POC python app was getting unwieldy for the scale it
was growing into and its complexity. But we had no one in the firm who knew
this, no support network for this, and I kind of saw that this was likely to
be a flash in the pan kind of thing. I had to say no, and he was all pissy and
was like but JVM! and arguments like that. I am really glad we didn't go that
route, because kotlin is all but dead, and that guy left after about a year,
and we would have been left high and dry.

My larger point is- what seems like such a cut and dried correct answer when
its just from your viewpoint, can look very wrong when put in context of an
organization, but unfortunately the end perception is often "my boss doesn't
get it."

~~~
Hates_
As a side topic, what leads you to say Kotlin is all but dead?

------
deltron3030
CEOs can't really communicate with developers or designers if they have no
practical experience with development or design. Lack of mutual respect can
make it very hard to find a balance between giving enough creative freedom and
setting deadlines. They may either give too much creative freedom to avoid
problems (expensive in the short term), or don't give enough to play safe
(toxic & expensive in the long term).

------
phaemon
Well, what else is a failing software engineer to do?

~~~
MattGaiser
Pit them against each other to get raises?

------
thesumofall
I think this goes two ways. Yes, management is failing to manage creative
work. But in too many companies (and I’m not talking about startups full of
youngsters straight out of college) staff has also lost the ability to be
creative, take ownership, and push their own ideas. It is very easy to fall
into a “I wasn’t told to do so” routine. This is obviously a reinforcing
circle

------
Kinrany
After reading this, I wonder if it's possible to document in a searchable way
all the broken solutions that we try before we find the one that works.

Subthread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23875261](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23875261)

------
demadog
Does anyone know what this phenomenon is called:

“This phenomenon is due, in no small part, to how our brains, in response to
the thrill of successfully completing a rewarded task, releases euphoric
chemicals that strongly reinforce the behavior that led to success.”

~~~
phonethrowaway
amygdala, dopamine reward.

it's a feedback loop of reinforcement.

------
GekkePrutser
Bill Gates was actually quite a capable software engineer (I would argue he
was a pretty rotten CEO though - successful but unethical).

And Steve Jobs too. He wrote games for Atari. Not a good CEO from the start
but during Next and Pixar he really learned the job.

------
paulie_a
I think it's the other way around. Software engineers rarely "get it" and are
more concerned about the technical challenges

------
russdpale
Is this the dumbest question ever asked?

------
doonesbury
To borrow a line from "Pulp Fiction" let's not start sucking each other's
_?_?s just yet.

"How do you best motivate software engineers? You attract them to significant,
life changing work by elevating the need, the thing that's missing from life
or society, a problem that needs to be solved, and extending a personal,
creative opportunity to solve that problem. Software Engineers are motivated
to solve epic problems with solutions that people love."

Let's not try to manage better by making software engineers out to be poor,
misunderstood Giants of Action who are just trying to fight the good fight if
only the business people would pull their share of the load.

Doctors, lawyers (think family law), and plenty of others are well motivated
too. I've done 30+ years of software dev. Software like any other industry
attracts a diversity of people ... lots of exemplary but also good doses of
risible dumb-asses that no management will ever fix.

OP continues:

"The best way to motivate creative staff is to attract them to meaningful work
through the use of strong attractors."

This is where the article just goes stupid and never recovers. Only a moron
believes that the employee is somehow unconsciously enabled for greatness but
otherwise an empty vessel if ONLY management would fill our need for meaning
and direction with something preferably a solid budget, a five year plan, and
a goal of staggering goodness. So then what are software devs? The genius of
Oppenheimer (smart and good manager?) Linus T? Dirac? Or in fact blank,
useless slates that the mommy corporation needs to imprint to get anything out
of?

Like 99.9% of all Sunday school lectures this article talks about what without
how. So it's largely useless day to day. We're reminded ad nauseam about bad
thoughts, bad actions and its consequences but not how --- how to do something
better in the day to day.

Let's remind readers of few things:

\- Broadly speaking in his "Business Management" phase he forgot to mention
that many companies lacked SPC i.e. how to do the day to day and to get away
from articles like this that throw around another 10,000 maxims. These same
companies weren't customer focused (be customer in not supplier out) ... on
and on ... the managements phases he mention forget to mention that even the
best corporations in their respective phases waste a ton of money, and a ton
of talent not because of high flung issues like motivation and meaning but
because of more basic issues like customer focus. Creative management by then
is a distraction.

\- A major problem at large corporations is not that management fails to play
the role of a fundamentalist Baptist selling the good news door to door
tirelessly saving us programmer-sinners, it's lack of openness (corporate
speak BS), and silos. Those two issues defeat a lot of great guys and gals who
already come equipped with meaning, and direction, and a desire to change but
who eventually learn the unwritten corporate culture: we aren't gonna change;
and if you have a great idea X but aren't in the X department well then it's
not for you. Creative management isn't going to fix this; it will make it
worse. The whole arc of the OP's story just wholly misses vast swathes of what
really goes on in corporations that lower productivity and potential. In
particular, the creative management approach fails to admit control battles
exist.

\- The creative culture sounds nice. Maybe. Or maybe it's a quite different
thing. The perpetual ever always need for revolution is necessary to make and
perpetuate frivolous consumerism. If there's always something new then there's
always something new to buy. Related, there's a vaguely idealistic perhaps
anachronistic impulse that any relation in society is a business target: bust
it and make money "revolutionizing it".

\- Meaning and quality is everybody's problem. You can have superb management
and bad engineers or vice versa but if you think engineers are gonna make
management enlightened or vice versa you have a lot, lot more to learn. We're
here to help each other but also pull our own weight and learn ourselves and
not always with the immediate result of gratification, orgasmic release, or
profit.

------
ausjke
that made me recall what I heard often: "mediocre engineers turn into
managers" :)

------
known
Heads I Win; Tails You Lose;

