 Can you imagine if you wanted to play professional basketball, and you were good, you were on a couple of championship teams, and have set a couple of records, that they'd say to you "Okay, we'll let you play, but you have the be a CEO and give us a business plan we like."  What if in addition to being a great painter or musician, you also had to look great in a suit and have an MBA?
Or if you wanted to be a surgeon, and had to spend all day every day in meetings with people you don't like or respect, explaining to them, without hurting their feelings why you have to use this scalpel instead of that one.
Maybe you might not be a great CEO but you could paint Starry Night or sing a nice ballad, or arrange flowers nicely, or cook a great meal for 2000 people.
 I suspect in 20 or 30 years the tech business, if it survives all the bubbles that will come and go between then and now, will be structured around creative talent as well as corporateness (and I'm being generous to corporateness). But that day has not come yet. And until it does, btw, the tech industry is just as vulnerable and just as dumb as industries it looks down on. As long as you think of programmers as employees and not creative people, or see being a CEO as superior to being a world-class developer, you're vulnerable to disruption. Really big time disruption. |
