Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gregbair 5233 days ago
You're telling me there's not one person in Google who's not an engineer/geek? Advertising people? Accountants? The CFO, Patrick Pichette, includes time at a management consulting firm and has an MA in "Philosophy, Politics, and Economics". I'm sure there's some geeks out there that do work for the financial people there.

Sounds like a suit to me. Don't get me wrong, there's lots of great suits out there, but that's my point, there's nothing wrong with working for competent suits.
2 comments
nostrademons 5233 days ago
The problem is hackers reporting to suits, not non-technical people reporting to suits. There are very few software engineers that report up through Patrick, and those that are are usually in support roles for other positions (eg. quantitative finance) with significant domain knowledge of that other position. Or they report up through technical executives with their own P&L.

There're non-technical managers in other areas that manage engineers, but I don't think we've hired any since 2007, as we found it doesn't really work out that well.

link
freedaemon 5233 days ago
It's hard to find competent suits. And their understanding of tech is reducing, I'd suspect, as tech gets more complex.
link