Comment by ehhthing
14 days ago
I've noticed that it's all the chip companies that have CEOs that understand to a deep level the stuff that the company is actually doing.
Compare and contrast the big software / services tech firms...
It feels like companies like Intel, AMD, Nvidia and TSMC are much more about delivering good technical solutions to hard problems than software companies like Google or Microsoft that try to deliver "concepts" or "ideas".
I do sometimes wonder though why decision making at a company like AMD benefits so much from having a highly competent engineer as the CEO compared to let's say Oracle...
You don't want to hear this, but it's because what we programmers do is the easy part of software. In the hardware business the goal is well-defined (just be faster+) and all the magic is in how to do it. In software the difficult part is figuring out what the customer actually wants and then getting your organization to actually align on building that. The coding itself is easy.
+There is obviously some nuance to what faster means. Faster at what? But finding some popular workloads and defining benchmarks is a lot easier than what software people have to do
Who doesn't like hearing that we (programmers) get all the fun, easy work while the other suckers in the economy have to put in the hard work for our benefit?
Agreed, most hard coding problems are due to requirements thrashing and business vision churn. All things related to figuring out what the customer wants.
Calling all the “ad-ware” web companies “Tech companies” is what leads to this apparent contradiction. It is largely identity appropriation across the board.