On Becoming a VP of Engineering
I found this part amusing: &quot;Charity [company founder] has a more intuitive, spontaneous style, often shines brightest in a crisis, is allergic to checklists&quot;. It looks like an almost inadvertent admission. In other words, the founder doesn&#x27;t have the qualifications or characteristics that the underlings assume they need to be in a leadership position.<p>I automatically become CEO, CTO, etc., by starting my own company, and this is true of anyone who started their own companies, including the ones that are now BigCos. Founders don&#x27;t need any specific qualifications or characteristics to merit their positions. They choose themselves for leadership, and then they choose their friends as the first employees. Only much later does hiring become formalized. No matter how much you want to believe that hierarchy is a &quot;meritocracy&quot;, the founding of the hierarchy was undoubtedly chaos. Chaos is a ladder. ;-)<p>I&#x27;ve always felt that hierarchical, subservient thinking is strange, and I honestly never considered my former bosses to be &quot;better&quot; than me. As far as I&#x27;ve seen, corporate ladder climbing is essentially political. This post reminds me a lot of the endless series of essays about what makes a &quot;senior engineer&quot;. These are all written by people whose minds have been thoroughly corporatized, true believers in the hierarchy with an inner need to justify it.