Didn't Steve Ballmer start off at MSFT essentially in a biz ops role, supporting execs when the company was super small? Interesting how he became technical as the company grew. Pretty rare.
He graduated with a mathematics degree from Harvard so the concept of binary search would have likely been familiar to him. But you’re right, as far as I can tell, he never did any technical work like programming in his career.
Not only that, he was also better than Gates at math. From the acquired podcast episode on Microsoft:
> Ben: He's gregarious. Anyone who's ever met Steve or seen a video of Steve, you are well aware that this man has a presence. But the thing that people don't know about him is he is so unbelievably analytical. Steve is the guy that outscored Bill Gates on the Putnam exam.
It's surprising the extent to which the tech community overfits towards classifying intelligent individuals as either exclusively technical or nontechnical. Recruiters are especially weak in this regard, e.g., if you've ever been effective at sales or people leadership, you are likely ineffective at swe or data science or vice versa. The most intelligent folks I've worked with are very diverse in their interests and abilities. You can see this in an elementary school GT classroom. Why does the tech community believe this is always an either/or proposition?
Yep. Pigeonholing by narrow thinking individuals who aren't accustomed to ambiguity or lateral thinking, especially when exhibit talents in more than just technical areas, a person becomes "nontechnical" to a nonzero proportion of technical people while remaining "too technical" for a large fraction of business people.
PS: Recruiters generally come from the same cloth as car sales and sports, so they're not usually going to be the sharpest pencils in the drawer.
>PS: Recruiters generally come from the same cloth as car sales and sports, so they're not usually going to be the sharpest pencils in the drawer.
Aren't you committing a similar mistake here, saying that recruiters can only recruit? At my former job one of the recruiters was an engineer for 20 years. He said he just wanted to do something different after all these years.
> The most intelligent folks I've worked with are very diverse in their interests and abilities.
> as either exclusively technical or nontechnical
This applies outside of tech or generally in any role e.g. if you're a backend engineer they assume you don't know frontend or if you're a marketing specialist you're not good at sales.
I never get it either. We're people not machines but most people have this assumption like we're a game character - you get a job / trait and that's it.
Because we live in an era of specialization. Look at a companies job page - even startups have silos. I don't think this is strange or unusual. Its hard to be good at everything. If I'm spending 8+ hours per day doing sales, where am I going to find the time to be good at other things? Most people are working for the weekend or to spend time with their families. Diving into far off subjects related to work isn't always exciting.
Ballmer was good at riding coat-tails of others as a supporting figure but eventually started running MSFT into the ground. He demanded to personally evaluate every M&A activity >$10M. No bueno.
