Lots of people with engineering degrees and backgrounds hold very senior positions at large companies and happily make short term, profit driven, decisions every day. Unless you want to play a game of "no TRUE engineer" I don't think it would make a huge difference.

The UK is full of stuff, built by Victorian engineers. Quite a lot of it is still working. Some of it is quite beautiful. I doubt anything built by private equity backed companies will still be working in 100 years.

This is very true. Just look at Intel: people frequently complain that the company isn't "engineering-driven" any more, but back when I worked there, it was led by Craig Barrett, an engineer. It was a disaster: under him, they adopted the terrible P4 Netburst architecture that was married to the patented, proprietary, and very expensive RAMBUS memory. And that was just one of many terrible decisions in that era. Don't forget Itanic.

I don't know about your tastes, but personally (as an individual contributor) the idea of classic manager work (dealing with vacations, perf reviews, hiring, firing, etc) are extremely unappealing to me.

Good engineers don't have the neccesariy personality traits to climb over corpses of others to get into upper management. So those who end up in upper management are always the worst sociopaths who only know how to play the politics game as their main goal is just climbing the ladder, not developing good products/services. Exceptions do exist (Jensen Huang, Lisa Su, etc) but that's why they are the exceptions.

I get nervous reading when people write exceptions and name "good" CEOs or "good" celebrities. Lots of skeletons come out later. I don't like to put people on a pedestal, especially those we don't know intimately well.

> I get nervous reading when people write exceptions and name "good" CEOs or "good" celebrities

Good CEOs are good at being CEOs. That doesn't mean that they're good people.

Steve Jobs was pretty famously an a-hole, and did a number of morally questionable things.

But he also took Apple from the verge of bankrupcy to one of the most valuable companies in the world.

OJ Simpson was a fantastic football player. And he murdered (my opinion) Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.

It's OK to acknowledge that some people are good at one thing and are also terrible in other ways.

Funnily enough that's also often the issue with engineers - good at technical things but not so good elsewhere. There's a reason we all have different jobs.

>Funnily enough that's also often the issue with engineers - good at technical things but not so good elsewhere.

Exactly. There's plenty of examples of people we consider great engineers in history. Does it matter that some of them may have been terrible marriage partners? When we're discussing their engineering accomplishments, no. When we're talking about someone as a great scientist, engineer, business leader, etc., we're not also claiming that they're literally a saint. Of course they have flaws in other parts of their lives; everyone does.

Better to acknowledge that you are speaking in generalities and exceptions exist, but not to name those exceptions.

That's a vast overgeneralization. Sometimes instead of being sociopath the opposite is needed: the so-called emotional intelligence and knowing where the wind blows from so that you can act accordingly. I good example is Mira Murati whom I definitely wouldn't call a sociopath and instead is very flexible in her position, something that would be quite painful for many engineers (at least the ones I know).