[0xbadcafebee]

> Business leaders can't learn enough engineering to manage engineering companies.

Cisco Systems was led by CEO John T. Chambers from 1995-2015. His education was BS, BA in business and a JD. After he got his MBA he started in sales. During his time as CEO at Cisco, sales went from $1.9 billion to $49.2 billion. In 2000, Cisco became the most valuable company in the world.

Before Chambers was John Morgridge, who was an MBA. He helped oust the two founding engineers. Before him was Bill Graves (who had a BS in physics, but was only at Cisco for a year).

[Aromasin]

I think a lot of the reasons that engineers rag on business leaders more than engineering ones are that:

1. They haven't tried creating a product and then making money off it. It's amazing how painfully difficult that can be (without good Sales and Marketing).

2. They haven't done a (good) MBA and don't understand how much goes into it, so write it off as similar to an undergraduate business degree.

3. They have a superiority complex from their university days where engineering was the hardest discipline.

Pat Gelsigner's favourite phrase is "We all work for Sales and Marketing". He says it over and over. I think at this time in Intel's history an engineer is the better one to be running the ship, but the idea that you need to be 100% tech savvy to run a successful tech company is, as you proved through your example, patently false. A good CTO can make all the difference in the product, while a good MBA-type CEO can focus on everything else.

[gxs]

This hits the nail on the head.

I’ve worked at both large and small companies, and engineers do tend to forget that no matter how good what they build is, it’s going nowhere without someone selling it.

Similarly, people on the business side often neglect the blood sweat and tears that can sometimes go into building something, forgetting sometimes that without a product there is no sales or marketing.

I really liked this response, but this is HN, people love romanticizing engineers to a fault.

At the end of the day, it’s just another false dichotomy. There are shitty business people just as there are shitty engineers.

Best to not be married to anyone idea in this case and just take it on a case by case basis.

[eszed]

Which is another way of saying: it's gotta be a partnership. That generalizes across all business categories, right? Product and Sales/Marketing have to work together.

That's such a banal insight that it's absurd so many businesses screw it up (in either direction) so badly.

[gxs]

Yes, even at my current company, which is by most measures, I'd say successful, this comes up to an absurd degree.

PMs will be ready to roll out a product with their finger on the button and Sales is like yo wtf we don't even know what we're charging for it yet or it's not even built into cpq/billing yet. So absurd that it's almost funny

[fennecbutt]

Yeah but does the person selling it deserve 100-1000x the renumeration than the people making it? Business leaders get all sorts of perks that the engineers don't, that's where the resentment comes from.

There's basically no crunch in MBA land.

[Hizonner]

Not sure Cisco had "two founding engineers", actually. Len would've qualified as an engineer, but Sandy was just... Sandy. And IIRC she thought of herself as the "business side" of the pair. Other pure engineers were of course there early on, but weren't running the company.

On the other hand, it's not obvious Chambers can be counted as a success in running an "engineering company". Chambers ran an acquisition company. It's entirely possible that an acquisition company was a more profitable idea than an an engineering company, but still.

[hayst4ck]

> It's entirely possible that an acquisition company was a more profitable idea than an an engineering company, but still.

I think the primary criticism engineers have against "MBAs" is that they make money, but frequently destroy value.

So "during his time as CEO at Cisco, sales went from $1.9 billion to $49.2 billion." is clear evidence of making money, but is not at all clear evidence of producing value and not any evidence at all of producing more money or value in the US in aggregate.

I don't think very many engineers would agree that "value == money," but it wouldn't surprise me if that was a core axiom of many people defending "MBA" leadership.

This is very very left field, but when the US went off the gold standard, money ceased to have a hard relationship to value because money could be invented and thus money games became more profitable than producing. It's worth contemplating China's strategy. Our money first businesses sending production to China made china the place where value is created. So when covid hit and we needed masks, we had money, but not value and people started to understand the difference leading to many of the efforts we see now like CHIPS. War is an economic shift where value is everything and money is nothing, and since the world is heating up (metaphorically and literally), it's worth centering arguments around value produced rather than money made.

[jacobr1]

I think it is more common that "shortsighted value" or "false value" is looked-down on by engineers. For example, you can increase profitability in the short-term by gutting R&D expense (engineers) but over time maintaining the system and innovating to stay-abreast of the competition will significantly suffer. Or "combining" products that on paper are complementary, but are made of such different tech-stacks and designed for different personas, that combo gets botched and users hate the product even it manages to be sold to exec that won't ever use it themselves.

[nabla9]

Your are doing "If I can find few counterexamples I debunked your argument."

[psunavy03]

You made an absolute statement . . . "business leaders can never lead an engineering firm." All that is needed to disprove that statement is one counterexample, because then it has to morph into "some business leaders can lead an engineering firm and some can't."

Ironically given the subject matter, this is similar to how math proofs work . . .

[gxs]

This is why I try to not correct people’s spelling in comments on the internet, your own comment is bound to have a misspelling or other grammatical faux pas somewhere in there.

[archgoon]

It's the nature of the word "can't" which allows a single counterexample to debunk an argument.

If the grandparent poster really meant "It is quite difficult", then it seems that we have arrived at a more accurate representation of the original argument, and thus 0xbadcafebee has been contributing greatly to the discussion.

[mrguyorama]

>In 2000, Cisco became the most valuable company in the world.

And there definitely wasn't some bubble going on distorting that value

[ls612]

And yet, in 20 years he still left the company with 20 times more sales than he received it. You could certainly do far worse as a CEO.

[sapiogram]

A rising tide lifts all boats. Maybe "most valuable tech company in the world" would be a more convincing argument, since the tide receded shortly afterwards.

[jryle70]

At the time that Cisco was top of the world, there were plenty of other high profile tech companies -- Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Sun, HP, DEC. On the networking side there were 3Com, Nortel etc. They all rose the tide of the dotcom bubble, yet Cisco came out on top. You should wonder why.

[mr_toad]

Cisco made routers during a period when the internet boomed. They’d have had to have screwed up badly to not grown rapidly.

[foobiekr]

Cisco had a lot of competitors in its growth era. Of them only the tattered juniper (soon HPE) remains.

Arista is doing very well now but Cisco is long past that growth era.

[esafak]

And PaaS takes care of it now. What do I care what router AWS uses?

[anikom15]

So what happened to all their competitors?