[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.