[geofft]

Exactly! (FWIW, I don't think fighting this in the court of public opinion, district of Hacker News is worth your time. The venue is prejudiced to believing that systems programming is a rare skill and we must all bow down to people who can do it, which is certainly not my experience as an actual systems programmer.)

[sam0x17]

If you think so little of yourself, why should we listen to you? I'm not saying we should all bow down to systems programming, I just think "CEO" is a role that doesn't need to exist for a company like this. You could probably roll up most of the daily duties of said CEO and have them carried out by an intern-level sales guy. Technical people should be setting the direction of technical projects. When they don't have the skillset, they should delegate. There is no need for this amorphous "CEO" person who has tons of power but no skills to back it up. The exception is if they came up with the idea, and helped execute it from the beginning.