[tw04]

>Current, sure, but he showed up after Google was already successful. Becoming the CEO of Google made him successful, but he didn't make Google successful.

And the previous CEO of Google was Eric Schmidt, also not a software developer, and successful before taking the role at google.

>True but he co-founded it with a software engineer (Wozniak) who was arguably influential enough that he had the influence of a CEO if not the title.

Just about every "CEO" has people with outsized influence. Saying that Woz had the influence of a CEO but not the title kind of misses the point.

>He may not have held the title or had the function, but apparently he had the knowledge.

I know how to make a woodshed (I even did last year!). I don't think anyone would confuse me with a carpenter.

[thu2111]

Eric Schmidt wrote lex. He was an engineering executive at Sun. His background is absolutely as a software engineer.

People seem to be missing the point of the article. It's all about ways of thinking. It isn't literally saying that the more algorithms you memorise the better at CEO-ing you become. That's way too literal. It's saying things like, "if you've written and debugged software a bunch of times, you learn about iteration and predicting/root causing failures, which helps you be a better CEO".

[triceratops]

> Eric Schmidt, also not a software developer

Wikipedia calls him a "businessman and software engineer". He has a PhD in EECS with a dissertation on "the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems."[1] He never coded at Google but he started his career in a technical role.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt

[the_local_host]

The software Eric Schmidt co-wrote in the 1970s (Lex) was used for decades. For all I know people still rely on it.

[andrewg]

Eric Schmidt was a developer - he wrote lex.