If your employees are managers, then it's (sometimes) okay to have no domain experience in whatever it is your company does, because the people you're managing aren't doing that thing. You only have to understand how those people think, and those people think—at least part of the time—like managers.

The job of the team leads—those managers whose only subordinates are domain-worker leaf-nodes—to act as a translation layer between your thought process and their subordinate domain-workers' thought process. They need the experience. (And they're the only "managers" that most people on HN seem to think have any value, given HN's love of flat org-charts like those of Valve and old-Google.)

But to be clear, while "EQ is a thing", for team leads, it's not enough. And in certain sectors (mostly industries where people are promoted into management roles by seniority), that continues to apply all the way up the org-chart, since in those organizations, the middle-managements will be ex-workers and will share the workers' views. So you, as a CEO, can't can't make any top-down decrees that conflict with those views.

For an example: any manager in a hospital, all the way up to the CEO, cannot get away with walking in off a stint at an F500 with no previous hospital experience, and succeed solely because they have high EQ. They need to also understand—deeply and intuitively—that their whole organization is run by people who think saving people's lives is more important than making a profit, and that any changes intended to increase profit at the expense of lives-saved-per-day will either be left unimplemented by the people on the ground, fought, or result in low morale and staff leaving. (Usually all three!)

Companies are also made of non-people systems, indeed the system is what distinguishes a company from just another collection of people. People don't need management so much as systems do. Management's job has to be to improve the system. You can optimize your people as much as you please, dealing with incentives, bonuses, punishments, team placements, making sure everyone is "doing their job", "getting along", etc., but none of that matters in the end for quality and efficient production if the system itself isn't stable.

Deming understood this, his management ideas that transformed countries have yet to break into software. https://maaw.info/DemingsRedbeads.htm is a starting point into the primacy of the system.

I'm sure it's possible. But in my experience, nontechnical people are generally not the best people to lead companies where the technology itself is a primary success factor. In such a business, I believe it is essential for top management to have an instinctive feel for the potentials and weaknesses of the technology.

Admittedly, such companies are a minority, perhaps a small minority, of what are called "tech companies". A lot of "tech companies" are simply applying relatively-well-understood technology to business problems. But when the mission of the business requires pushing the edges of what's possible, it needs leaders who understand what that means.

I've worked for 6 tech companies. Only in 2 did the owner know how to code. Only one was the owner an ex professional coder. They were all charismatic to some degree. Although the less charismatic were more pleasurable to work for, for whatever reason.

But there's a difference between not knowing how to program, and having never even used a computer!

Coding experience might give a leader more empathy for their employees, but the latter gives them an understanding of their customers and users.

Interesting Ref - https://www.bl.uk/learning/cult/bodies/vitruvius/proportion....

>Though he [Steve Jobs] could not code

Right, I'm going to throw a MASSIVE [citation needed] here.

> with enough software development experience ...

^ this detail basically supports the initial point that domain experience is required..

The problem then is knowing what constitutes a good "what" to decide upon. This can end up with them listening only to their favorite subordinate who may well be offering bad advice when other underlings know better.

Right, but you wouldn’t want a conductor who has never listened to any music. You can have an expert orchestra, but if the conductor is just waving his arms around like he saw in a photo once, they’re just going to ignore the conductor and do their own thing.

I think the point of discussion is about decision making. Steve wasn't involved in detail design, programming or engineering but he made decisions. It was his vision, not their subordinates'. He rallied support for his vision of personal computing.

When managers don't make decisions, and instead leave up to their staff to make decisions, what is their job then? "Managing"? Meaning, sitting down on 1:1s every week and act as a face of the team, do yearly reviews and assign safety training courses?

Intelligent and skilled workforce should not waste their time reporting to these people who have no vision or spine of their own.

Which leads us back to square one, because to do that efficiently they need experience. If they can't tell a dumb feature request from their ass, they're part of the problem.