Not only can strong technical people not report to non-technical people, they need those they report to, to be much better than them along at least one obvious technical dimension.
People think there are exceptions to this rule, they could not be more wrong.
Conversation
How do you reconcile CTO —> CEO?
1
Replying to
“the biggest predictor of whether a company will successfully adopt machine intelligence is whether they have a C-Suite executive with an advanced math degree.” —
Technical founders; nerds in charge.
Look at IBM — sales people can’t manage an elite technical organization. They had plenty of great technical talent. For a long, long time. Even pretty recently.
1
Obviously you’ll need to interact with non technical people at some level. Only China (and kind of France) have engineers running the government
Yah - still feel like there are plenty of examples (inc. recent ones) where this isn’t true, not specifically with ML, but someone like Jobs comes to mind.
1
People love to find counter examples to this very useful and accurate rule. I don’t know why.
1
Show replies
Great piece, and I've thought about that quote often.
1