This is probably more common than the context suggests. CEO/CTO that both claim deep technical skills while not having touched code in decades, one demanding to talk to engineers, the other claiming he's deep in the codebase and knows what's going on. The best executives I've worked with are the ones that freely admit they don't know about the code, the worst are the ones that insist they're "technical" and keep bringing up stuff from 20 years ago with no bearing on the current problem but believing they're sharing their technical expertise
Here's a sequence of events that led to me quitting a job:
- The owner/CEO of my company met with another local business owner and sold them on us doing some custom software work for them. He gave them an estimate during the meeting, and made a handshake deal.
- Owner tells a PM at our company about the project. Usual project kickoff stuff happens where the PM organizes a team and schedules a meeting with the client, etc.
- PM sends a meeting invite to a dev (me), a designer, and a QA, to meet at the client's office for the meeting.
- The owner of the client company does a similar thing, and at the meeting is 3-4 employees who know a lot about their business and the needs of this project. We talk for 2-3 hours and have a pretty good idea of what they need.
(details: The company operates a fleet of temperature sensors. They currently subscribe to a service that alerts them when a thermometer reports values too high or low. They don't like the software and don't want to keep paying for it, and want us to build them a replacement. Basically to collect a bunch of data from devices in the field, parse and store, send sms/email based on rules configured on a web app, and also have some really basic reports viewable)
- The team (4 people, including the PM) play agile games for a few hours, coming up with narratives and points.
- I get to work. Get access to the data, find a japanese manual online for the devices that describes the format of the data, set up a web app, database, user management, data download/parsing, a polling and alerting service. Lots of parts unfinished, but it's technically functional. Less than one week has passed (and my time is split across multiple projects).
- Project is put on emergency hold. Client found out how many hours we had spent, and was pissed. Apparently the person writing the check was told by our owner that it would be like 10-20 hours of work. That was never communicated to the employees at either company. The requirements gathering meeting exhausted the budget all by itself, unknown to everybody present.
- The PM is fired.
- The owner schedules a 1-on-1 meeting with me, where he spends 40 minutes describing the concept of database tables and rows. His thinking is that if I had only known how to store things in a database, the project wouldn't have taken me so long. Fortunately he gets a phone call and abruptly leaves.
- The client was apparently paying $20 a month for their monitoring software.
Lol, I always find it funny when people pretend that Parag is some clueless "management type". I graduated the same year as him from the same school, and he is a ridiculously sharp engineer who has risen up at Twitter the old-fashioned way. It's painfully obvious that Musk just wants sycophantic yes-men around him and was pissed off that Parag wasn't willing to kiss his ass regarding all his "revolutionary" suggestions.
Parag Agrawal joined Twitter a mere 11 years ago as a software engineer. He went from that to first CTO then CEO in a few years, at a big tech company. I have no doubt he has deep technical skills.
