I recently had a discussion about this with close colleagues, so I wonder what you think: how much better would things be in this company if the board of directors had a technical background?
Some feel that this is not so important as long as they have complementary skills to propel business forward. I still think that nothing can replace the technical background.
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Since the rise of the MBA, perhaps the Harvard MBA in particular, and things like McKinsey and Boston consulting... no tech background needed at all.
That's what the techies are for.
Or to say it another way... "Working on the biz isn't the same thing as working in the biz"...
Of course the older, in fact ancient approace was... "You start as a laborer, progress to being a carpenter, and only then do you become an architect. In this way you know all the levels and will not be architecting things that are impossible for your laborors and architects to do..."
"See : Book of Five Rings, Miyomoto Musashi"... it's an idea that's only been around since the beginning of time.
Half the problems we have with software these days is because the devs started as devs right out of school and never had to support code they didn't write in a Sev 1, time and mission critical situation...
Which is why there is such an age disconnect in the biz... the old timers did have to go through that apprenticeship in a lot of cases.
You should see Australian IBM Technology Sales VP and CTO. Neither of them come from tech background and the self proclaimed CTO merely has a project management experience. It really is a joke. No wounder 2Q results tanked in Australia.
Can confirm. I know someone who was non technical, a manager, moved to security as a new career, and after only 3 years got her STSM certification.
It’s a joke.
Are you kidding me? For the type of work that you do at ibm, if you hired a “software engineer” with a technical background and CS degree, they’d be bored and quit within a year.
I was in GBS. I could count on one hand the amount of people other than me who had actual technology / engineering qualifications, at high and low levels in the organization.
Looking through the job classifications, I don't think I could actually see "software engineer" - there were programmers, etc, but not software engineer.
My long time mistake was thinking of it as a tech company. It just isn't. And the other sad but true dilemma as I have moved through my career is that as you move up, you encounter fewer and fewer people who have any technology background.
It should be a requirement at least half the board are technical people. GR just picked big name resumes who have no idea what hybrid cloud is and got away with a lot. They couldn’t call BS on her because they didn’t understand it