[twblalock]

> it's the ten thousand other engineers who do the real work.

An army of ten thousand people marching in the wrong direction is what you get with bad leadership.

There is a lot of "real" work going on at a company like Google. Leadership really does matter, and there are a number of examples of bad CEOs running a company into the ground (e.g. HP) and good CEOs completely turning failing companies around (e.g. Steve Jobs coming back to Apple). None of those things would have happened if the CEO was just a figurehead.

Some engineers, notably junior ones without a lot of life experience, seem to believe that engineering teams could run the company by themselves and that leadership and other orgs don't provide any value. It's an immature world view that doesn't even work very well at startups, and certainly doesn't make any sense at large companies.