[dobladov]

People whose job is managing and not understanding issues does not want to deal with issues, it’s in their interest to always give the impression of everything working smoothly, that's why engineering driven companies fail the moment that managerial people takes over.

[khafra]

Executives and managers do actually contribute useful things to large-enough firms. But the failure mode of engineer-driven companies is Juicero; the failure mode of MBA-driven firms is killing people for profit (lying in order to sell poison to third-world mothers, sending death squads after labor organizers, lowering passenger airliner quality until they start falling out of the sky, etc.).

[maeil]

> But the failure mode of engineer-driven companies is Juicero; the failure mode of MBA-driven firms is killing people for profit.

This is one to hang on the wall as an office poster!

[rqtwteye]

I wouldn’t call Juicero engineering driven. More over-engineering driven. Similar to software developers creating hyper scalable microservice architectures for even the most trivial systems. True engineering is to understand the requirements and creating an efficient solution for those, not just throwing every possible technology at the project.

[regularfry]

That's why it's a failure mode.

[phanimahesh]

Juicero feels like a manager or growth hacker or hype person driven thing. I find it hard to imagine juicero being an engineering team.

[khafra]

I'm not a mechanical engineer, so I base my "overly engineer-driven" impression of the company almost solely on this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ

[blitzar]

Juicero feels like a failure mode of grindset.

[mindslight]

... and the Juicero type failure is worse from the perspective of most investors.

[Rinzler89]

Employees: - It's 3.6 Röntgen, but that's as high as the meter...

Management: - 3.6 Röntgen, not great not terrible.

[gaius_baltar]

A more fitting quote would be "They gave them the propaganda number".

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Was that from HBO's Chernobyl?

[ThePowerOfFuet]

Yes.

[cedws]

It’s a very HN thing to say, but god, the world would be so much better if we kicked these parasites out and engineers ran the show.

[dagw]

Lots of people with engineering degrees and backgrounds hold very senior positions at large companies and happily make short term, profit driven, decisions every day. Unless you want to play a game of "no TRUE engineer" I don't think it would make a huge difference.

[hermitcrab]

The UK is full of stuff, built by Victorian engineers. Quite a lot of it is still working. Some of it is quite beautiful. I doubt anything built by private equity backed companies will still be working in 100 years.

[shiroiushi]

This is very true. Just look at Intel: people frequently complain that the company isn't "engineering-driven" any more, but back when I worked there, it was led by Craig Barrett, an engineer. It was a disaster: under him, they adopted the terrible P4 Netburst architecture that was married to the patented, proprietary, and very expensive RAMBUS memory. And that was just one of many terrible decisions in that era. Don't forget Itanic.

[JTbane]

I don't know about your tastes, but personally (as an individual contributor) the idea of classic manager work (dealing with vacations, perf reviews, hiring, firing, etc) are extremely unappealing to me.

[Rinzler89]

Good engineers don't have the neccesariy personality traits to climb over corpses of others to get into upper management. So those who end up in upper management are always the worst sociopaths who only know how to play the politics game as their main goal is just climbing the ladder, not developing good products/services. Exceptions do exist (Jensen Huang, Lisa Su, etc) but that's why they are the exceptions.

[ashkankiani]

I get nervous reading when people write exceptions and name "good" CEOs or "good" celebrities. Lots of skeletons come out later. I don't like to put people on a pedestal, especially those we don't know intimately well.

[nordsieck]

> I get nervous reading when people write exceptions and name "good" CEOs or "good" celebrities

Good CEOs are good at being CEOs. That doesn't mean that they're good people.

Steve Jobs was pretty famously an a-hole, and did a number of morally questionable things.

But he also took Apple from the verge of bankrupcy to one of the most valuable companies in the world.

OJ Simpson was a fantastic football player. And he murdered (my opinion) Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.

It's OK to acknowledge that some people are good at one thing and are also terrible in other ways.

[HPsquared]

Funnily enough that's also often the issue with engineers - good at technical things but not so good elsewhere. There's a reason we all have different jobs.

[shiroiushi]

>Funnily enough that's also often the issue with engineers - good at technical things but not so good elsewhere.

Exactly. There's plenty of examples of people we consider great engineers in history. Does it matter that some of them may have been terrible marriage partners? When we're discussing their engineering accomplishments, no. When we're talking about someone as a great scientist, engineer, business leader, etc., we're not also claiming that they're literally a saint. Of course they have flaws in other parts of their lives; everyone does.

[lupusreal]

Better to acknowledge that you are speaking in generalities and exceptions exist, but not to name those exceptions.

[benterix]

That's a vast overgeneralization. Sometimes instead of being sociopath the opposite is needed: the so-called emotional intelligence and knowing where the wind blows from so that you can act accordingly. I good example is Mira Murati whom I definitely wouldn't call a sociopath and instead is very flexible in her position, something that would be quite painful for many engineers (at least the ones I know).