[api]

If engineers run the restaurant the food is excellent but the menu is confusing and there are no customers because nobody knows the restaurant exists.

If sales/marketing runs the restaurant it's full but there is no food. The menu is beautiful and shows all kinds of dishes nobody knows how to make.

If MBAs run the restaurant it's full of people paid to be there long enough to be counted and reported up to the investors and the food is purchased from the McDonalds next door and relabeled and resold at 3X the price. Nobody will ever come back but it doesn't matter. The metrics from this exercise are used to raise money to open three more restaurants across the street from convenient sources of cheap fast food. This novel model of running restaurants is written up in Harvard Business Review as an excellent example of an arbitrage business model.

If artists run the restaurant they make and eat the food themselves and then leave.

[vkazanov]

Engineer would first try to build a cooking machine.

[dylan604]

This is a nice summation. If LLMs ever produce this kind of output, I'll buy into the tech is good.

[fuzzfactor]

I think this makes a pretty good stereotype based on reality.

This is something of a dichotomy between engineering-based structures and sales-centric, with MBA's and designers as collateral players.

Everybody needs sales of some kind, but most businesses do not actually need "engineering", so there are not usually any engineers expected to in the chain-of-command. Even in an engineering company itself there may be only token members in the most critical decision-making positions.

A sales hierarchy sells from a select source of technology.

An engineering hierarchy selects a technology to be a source of.

They each have huge pallettes to choose from, but they are different.

I think many lifelong business operators are aware that it really takes far more years to truly learn their business than it would to enroll as a freshman and end up earning an MBA.

And that's not even engineering companies.

These are the kind of organizations that may have no worthwhile use for even the most talented decision-maker of any kind regardless of degree, until after their employment has been lengthy enough to have achieved the working acumen that is really necessary. In many cases taking far more years on active duty than in academic preparation, but it's worth it.

But even if you can do without MBA's forever, you still have to have Production, Sales, accountants, HR, Admin, security, IT, etc. You can only go so far with "engineers" only.

However, in one way to approach an ideal "engineering company" the entire chain-of-command consists of true technical leaders-by-consensus top-to-bottom in a Maslow-like way where by nature less consensus is needed toward the top where the individual vision finally becomes most powerful.

All the other departments report to this engineering backbone in one way or another so the buck always stops with somebody who can handle the engineering calculus and who always puts that kind of thing foremost from day one, without undue reliance on business calculus, which are two different pursuits to an extent.

Then if a gifted MBA or two have something to offer, they can do so while reporting to the appropriate engineers, never the other way around.

You need to get back to a more technically talented chain-of-command where they instinctively can make way more money through technology than any bean-counters would ever be able to save even if they laid everyone off.

No doubt you can accomplish a lot by having a completely non-technical chain-of-command, with engineering off to the side like other essentials such as accounting or HR. People do it all the time. But you can't really accomplish quite the same things after all.

Still it sounds like any customers who stumbled in to the "Engineering Restaurant" end up with the best as far as the food itself, although there is some "Artisan Dining" where the experience can be unforgettable too.

Sometimes you don't get much on your plate though, I wondered if they were in the back eating most of it themselves ;)