<i>&gt;100% of brain power into your programming work, and 0% of brainpower into business decisions.</i><p><i>&gt;Suddenly, what the businessperson does is not so hugely impressive anymore.</i><p>I took a 10 year hiatus from programming and spent 100% brainpower on the business.  At the time, I thought I had progressed into being a &quot;businessman&quot; and stopped programming (like Bill Gates).<p>With that experience, I&#x27;d emphasize again that executing business activities such as interfacing with clients, managing employees, and reading the signs of a fickle market to prioritize what software to build and make money is <i>harder than any computing algorithm</i> I have ever worked on including Paxos.<p>I suspect you&#x27;re elevating software programming above business tasks because of caricatures like Dilbert PHB (Pointy Hair Bosses) and shows like The Office.  Well those stereotypes are true because most &quot;businesspeople&quot; <i>are</i> clueless idiots.  But that&#x27;s just Sturgeon&#x27;s Law[1] at work: the majority of <i>every</i> profession (programmers included) is less than mediocre.<p>Creating a business and running it such that it doesn&#x27;t devolve into bankruptcy is as every bit as creative and as difficult as computer programming.  With software engineering, you deal with bits and bytes and defined tradeoffs (this network as X latency, that disk array as Y response time, etc).  Yeah, juggling all that is <i>complicated</i> but at least it&#x27;s mostly <i>deterministic</i>.  You add 5 to an integer and you don&#x27;t worry if a stray cosmic ray is going to randomly flip a bunch of bits around such that the integer now says 48390.  The cpu doesn&#x27;t conspire against you to debug the code.<p>On the contrary, the following business factors <i>are non-deterministic</i>:<p>-- humans, such as a fickle marketplace and customers that you can&#x27;t the minds of<p>-- humans, such as employees with their own needs &amp; wants that don&#x27;t necessarily align with the business.  Hiring good people is hard, etc<p>Each human is a like a bundle of bytes in a RAM that have their bits being randomly flipped by cosmic rays.  There is no deterministic wetware &quot;debugger&quot; to run on a bunch of people so that everyone works together to make the business successful.<p>Running a business is as hard (or harder) than computer programming.  So is managing a hedge fund to return +10% instead of losing investors&#x27; principal.  Those activities are &quot;hard&quot; in a different way from algorithms.  I don&#x27;t see why programming is elevated above them as being harder.<p><i>&gt;should I simply accept that business-people make more money than I do? No</i><p>I&#x27;m trying another business venture and I&#x27;d be perfectly fine with stepping back to just being a CTO and hiring a CEO that has a higher salary than me.  The higher salary is what it will take to attract somebody competent.  (Of course, I&#x27;d have more equity but that part is worth $0 if I&#x27;m the CEO.)<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sturgeon%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sturgeon%27s_law</a>