Yes… I had the president of a software development company tell me (in anger), “It’s not rocket science” after asking me why a deliverable was late. “I only see one form here, how can it be that hard?”, he said. At that time I was Project Manager and Software Engineer at a product development firm here in Des Moines. The president was not a programmer.

That brings up a question posed today by Mary-Jo Foley as Bill Gates prepares to leave Microsoft: “Do you need to be a programmer to run a software company?“. This is reference to Bill’s attention to detail to the software being built by his engineers.

Joel Spolsky wrote about it today, asking “How Hard Could It Be?” in his Inc.com column. Joel was a program manager of the Excel team in the early 1990’s and tells a great story that, to me, sums up Bill’s passion and persistence as the leader of a software company. Joel summed up my frustration (and likely many other developers’) of working for a software development company whose leaders know little to nothing about software devlopment:

“Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again. The cult of the M.B.A. likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand. But often, you can’t.” - Joel Spolsky