I bet he is a menace but so are probably 90% of c-suite tech execs. Like with Elon and Zuck it's the insecurities which make it at least funny to watch from the sidelines.
> I think there's a small but real chance he's eventually remembered as a Bernie Madoff
What's with all the hit pieces on Sam Altman lately? He's a CEO, his job is to grow the business, not to code. That part is handled by the engineers that he hired. How many CEOs out there are also great programmers? Sure, I would prefer Sam Altman to have more technical depth given the business he is leading, but lack of technical depth doesn't make him a Bernie Madoff.
I’m old enough to remember that Sam Altman’s claim to fame before OpenAI, before running YC, was running a failed also-ran location-based whatever Web 2.0 scam startup thing that accomplished nothing and that no one remembers. His entire “career” is based on persuading people with money to give him more of it.
The incentive structures are such that everyone sucks up to people in a position to give you a lot of money, so all these people with no real skills, talent or track record get regarded as “geniuses”, but like, even when you understand why this happens, it doesn’t make it any less rage-inducing.
What would have to change in this society for people who actually do shit to have a higher profile than people who just have a lot of money?
I think there's more nuance to it from what I can find on the internet.
Jobs definitely had knowledge about coding and other technical issues to do his job. Here's Eric Schmidt on this:
He was exactly the same way he was at Apple: strongly opinionated, knew what he was doing. He was so passionate about object-oriented programming. He had this extraordinary depth. I have a PhD in this area, and he was so charismatic he could convince me of things I didn’t actually believe.
I should tell you this story. We’re in a meeting at NeXT, before Steve went back to Apple. I’ve got my chief scientist. After the meeting, we leave and try to unravel the argument to figure out where Steve was wrong—because he was obviously wrong. And we couldn’t do it. We’re standing in the parking lot. He sees us from his office, and he comes back out to argue with us some more. It was over a technical issue involving Objective C, a computer language. Why he would care about this was beyond me. I’ve never seen that kind of passion.
Wait, that's it? Seven paragraphs, all short? Two quotes, one from some anonymous MS exec? Is the site sending some minimal version of the article to me because I'm using Brave, or is this the lowest-content article I've seen in weeks (and I'm on Twitter)?
This doesn’t really surprise me. Most company leaders don’t have a detailed view of day to day work, they couldn’t step in and do every employee’s job. What they are good at is creating a clear story and direction that brings people together around a shared goal. That’s what Sam has done, especially in how he’s sold that vision to investors and raised billions. You could say the same about leaders like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. It’s not necessarily a perfect system, but it’s often how companies grow and attract funding. No, they are not the perfect humans. It's just how business works.
As a culture the west needs to understand that CEOs aren't exalted super geniuses. Most of them are shockingly average in their intelligence, some are even below average. In their focus area they are usually competent, but not as much as someone who is still actively doing that type of work. But usually the "special" quality they have in abundance is sociopathy. https://thecontextofthings.com/2019/10/17/so-are-most-ceos-s...
I don’t think Sam Altman has claimed to be a tech genius, and I don’t think he needs to be one for the role he’s in, CEO and engineer are not the same thing and require different skill sets. If people want to attack him, there are probably better vectors than this one.
The real question is - is he actually a good CEO? Has he done any better for the company than someone else would have? I think that’s the real unanswered question and stands quite apart from any ethical or character critiques.
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[ 0.73 ms ] story [ 41.5 ms ] threadIt's not a small chance, it's close to 100%. If your bullshit detector is not going off, you have a serious problem.
What's with all the hit pieces on Sam Altman lately? He's a CEO, his job is to grow the business, not to code. That part is handled by the engineers that he hired. How many CEOs out there are also great programmers? Sure, I would prefer Sam Altman to have more technical depth given the business he is leading, but lack of technical depth doesn't make him a Bernie Madoff.
The incentive structures are such that everyone sucks up to people in a position to give you a lot of money, so all these people with no real skills, talent or track record get regarded as “geniuses”, but like, even when you understand why this happens, it doesn’t make it any less rage-inducing.
What would have to change in this society for people who actually do shit to have a higher profile than people who just have a lot of money?
Tons of people can code. Coding is not some sort of mythical skill. Millions of people can code.
For some reason, this narrative is almost always applying on people who are politically incompatible with the left like Elon and Sam.
Also why is a low effort commentary piece of the NYT article on the HN front page?
Jobs definitely had knowledge about coding and other technical issues to do his job. Here's Eric Schmidt on this:
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/magazine/eric-schmidt-on-steve-j...(This comment has essentially been taken from reddit[0] @thirdxeye as I think that he summed it better than I could)
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/34y49x/did_steve_job...
The real question is - is he actually a good CEO? Has he done any better for the company than someone else would have? I think that’s the real unanswered question and stands quite apart from any ethical or character critiques.