Something that has always surprised me a bit is how many developers want to run their own large companies. Wanting to run a small company is largely about personal freedom that comes for not having a boss, but wanting to be the head of a large business is a whole different ballgame. It's a role that encompasses strategy, leadership, and management - 3 things that can only really be done by talking to people and understanding them. It's a very different role to writing code. Most developers who enjoy writing code run away from meetings given the slightest opportunity, yet they also covet a job that's 90% about having meetings.
For a very long time that was my own journey. I got up to CTO level for a while. Then I realized I just don't enjoy it, so now I'm a senior engineer again. Wanting to be a CEO takes a very specific mindset.
There are just as many headaches in running a small company and frankly it's overly romanticized by so many people.
There is no such thing as 'not having a boss' unless you live in a cabin in the woods, independent of the world.
Either you work for a corp. with a manager, with what are frankly relatively clear functions - or - you work for the whims of the market and or consulting customers (and possibly a board and investors) in which case you adopt an utterly different tone and there's no expectations of clarity or consistency and you're always on your heels.
I don't think people have an internal conception for how that 'stability, clarity and peace of mind' that they seek is actually a total luxury, something which all those people working out there struggle and toil to create. Like a little cottage on the ocean that doesn't move with the big waves, it's a fabrication, something constructed, not a 'simpler escape' detached from the system.
I thought not having management and only customers would beat having both, investors are the worst kind of management so IMHO. Turned out that having some layers of management between you and customers / investors is a nice thing to have. Especially if said management isn't completely incompetent.
> Something that has always surprised me a bit is how many developers want to run their own large companies.
I am surprised at how few of them do, considering how low the barriers of entry to company making in tech are (compared to other industries with heavy requirements in space, equipment, expertise and regulations)
So I am also surprised at your experience. Most devs I know just wanna code.
I don't believe there is anyone out there who just likes to sell. It is an incredibly volatile way to make a consistent living. Specially asking them to believe that only you believe in.
We all know that developer who wanted to start their own startup/product but felt into hard times and so to keep the lights running they started to do consultancy/freelancing on the side. Then consultancy became their main thing and the startup was sent to the back burner or they just quit the venture entirely.
> So I am also surprised at your experience. Most devs I know just wanna code.
Same here. Never heard of any developer wanting to be CEO of a big company. Typically startup, yes, but that's mostly for "independence" and doing something cool, faster, etc.
First, I think you're very wrong about how many devs want to run their own companies. Or at least, want it enough to make any step in that direction (just wanting it like wanting to win the lottery doesn't count for much, IMO).
Second, I also think you have a very common but incorrect view of what a developer even is. You write:
> Most developers who enjoy writing code run away from meetings given the slightest opportunity,
Most developers don't necessarily enjoy writing code. Some do, to be sure, but a lot view writing code as a means to an end. Sometimes that end is money; sometimes that end is to create products. And if what you want is money, or to create new products (or to have new experiences, or to have a fancy job title, etc), all of those are reasons to want to run a large company. (Not all of these are what I would consider good reasons, but they are reasons).
Secondly, you can really hate meetings when your job is to write code, but also would enjoy meetings when your job is no longer only about writing code. Forget running large companies - most people who get even a mid-level manager position will be busy in meetings for a large amount of their time, and will rarely if ever code, and this is considered a very desirable career path by many devs (though not all, to be sure).
I went through a version of that, I wanted my own company, large enough to justify the name and having people doing the work but small enough to be more operational involved as a large corp CEO. Turned out I didn't like running a company, the smallest one imaginable, at all. Now I'm back in employment as a supply chain ops manager, and that is so much more fun! I just have to reign my urge to pursue "large" improvements from time to time. If I can finally do that, that will he the most fun, and chill, job ever.
It's much more surprising that people equate "run a small company" with "freedom", when in every measurable way you're much freeer being a conformant employee in a good place.
Might be referring to the concept of a lifestyle business [0]
> A lifestyle business is a business set up and run by its founders primarily with the aim of sustaining a particular level of income and no more; or to provide a foundation from which to enjoy a particular lifestyle.
One book that helped me understand these challenges was "Hard things about hard things". I recommend/gift the book to any (engineer) friend who is burning to start his own business. It's a different game. Even Sr. Engineer is a different game than coding, we spend some time on System design, mentoring, presenting technical outcomes of our work/PoCs, writing new product requirements, .. etc. I think these tasks require other skillsets as well.
The flip side is that one will be a much better senior engineer after having been a CEO (or even a manager, or just had a diversity of roles). Most managers say they care more about soft skills than hard skills, and that's actually how you build those soft skills.
Most engineers like tech, but have little exposure to how they interact with the larger organizational structure and design, with customers, with fundraising, and with a slew of other things. Stepping through a few roles gives that visibility. That makes for a better engineer.
I'll start and end my career in a tech role, but I do periodically do dives into other sorts of roles in the meantime.
As a developer you're often seen as a one trick pony who is destined to stay at the bottom. If I get to make it to CEO that would be far beyond my wildest dreams.
> ...how many developers want to run their own large companies.
This sounds like an unremarkable subset of {vaguely dissatisfied lower-level workers who dream of a new job with far more power, fame, money, and/or interesting stuff}.
Similar are the people who read novels (at least occasionally), and have dreams of becoming a famous author. In my experience, ~0% of them are actually willing to sit down and try to write a 3-page story.
I don't entirely want to be CEO, what I want is ultimate control over things I'm interested in, which is definitely not everything involved in being CEO.
If I say "no that would be bad, goes against my ethics, increases tech debt too much, bad for UX, etc." I don't want anybody to override me, even though generally decisions ultimately fall on the CEO.
The answer is status. Most developers are (despite being comparatively well-paid) quite low-status: people tell them what to do all the time and they are expected to comply. By contrast CEO is pretty much the top of the status pole. It is natural for human beings to crave status so it is natural to dream about being CEO even if most won't particularly enjoy it.
I think that the issue is that many developers want to write "good" code but are forced to write code as quickly as possible to get features out the door. If you already don't enjoy your work because you are not able to take enough time to do it well, then even if you don't enjoy it, you may as well be the person in charge.
I have to agree. Level of suck at management is also unrelated to any one quantified linear scale so the mean is the result of a particularly arbitrary personal (or national like GPA with range bias vs 0-20 with other bias) definition of a corresponding numerical ratings so median and mode have fewer degrees of freedom for arbitrary results.
It is also pretty absurd to assume without explanation that a minority who are especially bad at management have even their minority presence in management given that if sucking matters it should correlate with some type of failure that eventually correlates to drop out.
As a native speaker average is almost exclusively used to for mean and people specify median or mode when that’s what they are talking about. The same way people say mean without specifying arithmetic, geometric, or harmonic mean then it’s the arithmetic mean.
It’s only when someone says something like the average family rather than saying the average income when things get ambiguous. Typical on the other hand is closer to mean because it’s tossing out outliers.
I know that feeling, I learned the hard way so that having better ideas, and seeing stuff you propose after 2 years kind a proofs that, is different from actually acting upon these ideas when you are in a position of power.
Pretty much the entire genre of "How To Succeed In Business" is nothing but an illustration of survivorship bias. The common attributes that get identified are almost always either also shared by those who didn't succeed or if not were likely irrelevant to the success.
exactly. this is so basic, it's staggering that the article doesn't cover it. I realise hbr isn't a peer reviewed journal, but it's pretty disgraceful that a publication that carries the name of what is claimed to be the top university in the world peddles research that, whatever merits it may have, disingenuously uses a flawed argument like that. And unfortunately this isn't even the worst of its kind in HBR...
I don’t think it is surprising that HBR publishes this kind of article. On the contrary this is exactly why we can trace most of the organizational problems and a lot of societal ones to the ideology factory called Harvard Business School.
That’s not true. If you only look at CEOs you won’t be able to tell which behaviors are unique to CEOs and which are not. If you don’t eliminate these potentially universal traits and behaviors you’re setting yourself up to be be wrong due to biased data. More generally: how can you possibly understand what something is without understanding also what it is not?
And actually what I did when I formed my first company. I had two plastic cards designed, one for me as "CEO" and another as a press pass with me as "Chief Editor", which actually got me into some expos!
Blogs were new and people didn't know how to treat these "online magazines" and "journalists".
I even had people from big newspapers contact me with requests to use my online comments in their articles. Good times.
So embarrassing to remember, but I had a lot of fun.
Biggest mistake ever was to not find partners asap.
i like your style. i use to do this at festivals. i would jump up on stage behind any band and pretend to be with the band. it worked. the following year i realized i could make an online magazine and become press, so i did and the next year i got in half price, press pass, and a table. wild ride
I was always a natural leader up until graduating from college. Had plenty of volunteer leadership roles, but never any roles officially employed as a manager. Then after graduating, I suddenly found I could make far more money as an individual software enginneer than my peers were making in management roles at local companies, so I've been chasing the money for the last decade. But it feels like a bit of a dead end in terms of career accomplishments, and I'd like to shift back into leadership roles, but after a decade of structured roles writing instructions for machines, the relatively unfixed day-to-day responsibilities of management, and strategic thinking about people and more "squishy" things than computers, feels foreign to me. I don't know how to change my mindset back to that.
The non-obvious thing was that the author walks blindly into every single survivorship bias there is and then draws a definitive conclusion based on them.
They reverse engineer CEO's trackrecords... Good thing all these CEO's are blissfully unaware of their relative luck and build upon their own ability to fix anything.
Nothing is ever non-obvious in hindsight in the social sciences ;)
That said, I like that one way this can be read is that being a C-level executive is typically not about some inherent skill or talent. Instead, people simply grow into the role when given (and taking) the chance. This has implications on what a just level of compensation would be.
The "go small to go big" thing isn't about being a CEO of a small company.
It's about taking over a small project, growing it successfully, then using that experience & reference to launch yourself into the CEO position of a large company.
The “i regret becoming a manager” theme gets repeated often and I don’t know about you guys but I go to work for the money, plain and simple. Sure coding is pleasurable (I’d do it for free as a hobby anyway) but if being ceo pays many times more, I’d just go for that if possible. Seems almost unreasonable not to desire that job over a coding position..
I wish there were more details to the claim, because my hunch is that most people regret becoming middle-management, squeezed between whom holds the budget and whom does the work, unable to affect neither but responsible toward both.
I'm curious how to deal with the social pretenses in hiring? I.e. do you express this view in a developer interview or do you keep it contained to the low end of where you want to be in 5 years being similar to a motivated developer?
I'd also point out that money is in exchange for something. I would much rather be in a low stress job that pays enough than having more money than I have time to use, ulcers and permanent negative health and behavioral factors that will follow me into retirement..
Having a senior leadership position in “late 20s” sure seems like privilege and connections to me. Who cares about “sprints” when your family has all the benefits and the executive positions are the default.
Yup. Survivorship bias. For every one of those there are 10 who were in a) The wrong industry, b) The wrong business model, c) The wrong product, d) The wrong collaborators (you know, the ones that cannot be easily removed even if you wanted to.) So much luck involved. I equate it to bands, for every Beatles there are 100s of unsuccessful solo artists who started out every bit as talented as Paul & John. Eventually the really good ones do make it I think, but not the way they expected, and not as one of these CEO sprinters.
> Sprinters don’t accelerate to the top by acquiring the perfect pedigree. They do it by making bold career moves over the course of their career that catapult them to the top.
This article looks like yet another one that screams for a survivorship bias disclaimer:
https://xkcd.com/1827/
Any study of successful people (or really successful anything, according to any criteria you choose for “success”) can be dismissed as a “survivorship bias”. But it’s quite baseless to presume that no insight can be gained by studying them.
What type of bias is it when you just invent an explanation for something out of thin air?
If you select a sample of observations matching your criteria, and then do a factors analysis of them, you're effectively committing the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy (another way of describing survivorship bias).
If instead you were to randomly select from a cohort of individuals and track their career trajectories, then you'd be looking at what factors contribute most to success.
I suspect the latter might be rather more strongly weighted to the generally-recommended career advice of good school + business degree + management-track positions early in career, though of course, that's precisely the hypothesis that you're trying to establish.
Point being that there are a lot more people who graduate from the School of Hard Knocks and advance through smaller firms (of which there are far more than there are top-school graduates).
Then you get to address questions such as whether or not school actually is determinative in careers, or is merely selecting for those destined to succeed regardless. (There was an interesting incidental study done based on NYC magnet school examination cutoffs, which are quite arbitrary, and for which there's significant evidence that those at least immediately bordering the selection criteria (and possibly more broadly) have roughly equivalent career / earnings trajectories).
Among the few interesting elements in the HBS "study" is the possible role of high-risk gambles in career advancement. That also ultimately points to survivorship bias (it excludes those who took such gambles and lost), though there's the prospect of multiple-iteration games as well. So long as the upside gain (CEO-track) is high, and the downside loss (failed that advancement attempt, but no penalty) is low, there's little harm in making such attempts.
If, however, failed attempts are read as a flag against future consideration, the calculus changes remarkably. This is typical of many "up or out" advancement policies.
> Among the few interesting elements in the HBS "study" is the possible role of high-risk gambles in career advancement. That also ultimately points to survivorship bias (it excludes those who took such gambles and lost), though there's the prospect of multiple-iteration games as well.
This is a fundamental problem with dismissing all accounts of success so broadly. Multiple-iteration is not a possibility, it’s a certainty.
If you take risk in your career, and you fail, the only way that failure can prevent you from trying again is if you fail so hard that you actually die. Failing to death is a tremendously uncommon occurrence when it comes to taking to taking risks in your career.
The survivorship bias argument really only works if you imagine each person has a single opportunity through their entire life to achieve success. The Texas sharpshooter fallacy isn’t exactly relevant here either, because that is about re-defining the conditions of success after you’ve taken your measurements. The idea of success here is clearly pre-defined.
Fair points, and I was trying to indicate this myself.
More broadly though this highlights the importance of thinking through the model and looking closely at methodology. The HBS article itself really doesn't provide sufficient inforation to judge.
From the book promoted in the article: The CEO next door (p. 22)
"With a ‘Moneyball’ approach to leadership..." review
Sampling/methodology
"One of the reasons for this (stereotypical CEO/survivor bias) is that we tend to limit our
thinking to the companies and leaders that regularly
appear in mass media. This view—typically focused on
Fortune 500 companies—is very narrow. It is also very
shallow: we know little about these leaders beyond their
seemingly perfect public bios. We tend to ignore the vast
universe of companies of all sizes. If you broaden the lens
beyond the Fortune 500, there are, for example, over two
million companies with more than five employees in the
United States alone.5 This means over two million CEOs: a
broad, rich set of leadership experiences that don’t often
get talked about in the press."
In expectation, it might not even be the fastest route (I suspect it isn’t). Ie on average following this advice might make it longer to reach CEO position (and you might not reach it).
It’s a shame, they have the data and could have asked the question.
Come from an Ivy League institution. If you have trouble being accepted into it, remember that if George bush could get into Yale, every other prick like you have a chance too.
Have no morals.
Despise the working class and fuck them thoroughly every chance you have to show the pricks in Wall Street you are one of them.
Yes, there may be survivorship bias. But I also think there is no “safe fast way” to become a CEO.
When I look at traders and investors, I see the same thing. Most of them are a result of being very lucky and aggressive. Only a few of them actually did it without much luck (e.g. Simmons).
Not necessarily thrown to them, but sometimes they were looking for. The "study" does not tell how to become THE CEO of a Fortune 500 company, but how to become "a CEO somewhere". If you want really bad to become a CEO, you can be the CEO of a free falling former big company, like a former director of mine is today: it checks the CEO box, nothing more.
I knew a man who turned a CFO of Bank of America not so well known Japanese venture at around 30 when the previous CFO died on the job, and a dozen people above him declined the job.
For a very long time that was my own journey. I got up to CTO level for a while. Then I realized I just don't enjoy it, so now I'm a senior engineer again. Wanting to be a CEO takes a very specific mindset.