Why does global companies choose developers as their CEO?

What are similarities of Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Sundar Pichai (Google), and Mark Zuckerberg(Facebook)?

All of them are IT developers who became CEOs.

As Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook, Zuckerberg being the CEO makes sense. However, the other two, Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai began their career as developers and climbed up to the current CEO positions.

Then why are these giant IT companies like Microsoft, Google and Alphabet, so called global companies, choose CEOs from developers?

In the field of ICT, which is the heart of the future industry, important decisions must be made faster and more accurately due to the pace of change and development. Obviously, every decision takes time, effort, and money. As ICT technology is converged in all recent businesses, managers who do not know technology have limited areas in which they can make judgements.

There is no longer guarantee that yesterday’s customer will remain to be today’s customer.

As such, needs of customer change rapidly.

Then what kind of competencies should leaders have?

Before you answer the question, let us talk about how programmers implement programs.

Even if you write code that performs a simple function, there are so many ‘if’ statement in the code implemented by programmers, so that there is almost no code without an ‘if’ statement. Translation the ‘if’ statement here is not different from the English translation.

“If ~ then”.

When programmers implement programs, the code they use the most may be the ‘if’ statement.

You can think of the code that the programmer implements as a set of “functions”. Here, you can think of “function” as a program unit that performs a specific function.

Every function has a set input and output. In other words, the inputs and outputs are fixed. It receives a set input value and makes a set output value come out.

You write a program for the input and output values ​​set in this way, and many if statements are included in the function.

Programmer extracts and defines all situation (including exceptions/errors) that can occur within the function. And all these situations are controlled within the if statement.

Rather than simply writing a program code that outputs a set result, it writes the code taking all situations into account and even considers situations such as when incorrect input value is entered or when a network fault occurs.

“This situation will never happen. So you don’t have to consider this situation.”

Constantly consider questions like “Could this happen? if such a situation occurs, the system might be down if you do not implement exception handling for this.. What should I do?”.

And one of the other features of programmers is that they think based on data.

All programs are eventually meant to process data. Exposure to database design, programmers learn how to define useful data and manage it to be most effectively used.

You know the importance of the ability to analyze data.

When you face possible cases and come up with countermeasures, you always do a data-driven thinking process, so programmers naturally, very quickly solve problems as well as how to get results for a given problem. They are trained in recognizing, defining, and thinking of solutions to various situations that may arise during the process.

Back to the main point, what kind of competencies should leaders have?

Just like programmers, leaders must have the ability to predict and respond quickly to various business situations that may arise in the process of solving problems, in addition to the ability to quickly produce results for a given problem.

Problem-solving skill of Programmer; I define the programmers’ way of thinking process as programming thinking.

You need to know “Programming Thinking” and develop your “Programming Thinking” competency.

Due to the importance of this capability, more and more companies choose developers to represent their companies as well as global companies such as Microsoft and Google.

During decision making process in today’s rapidly changing consumer needs, you must explore all the possible alternatives before deciding which one is most effective.

To find the best solution, it is necessary to find all unexpected risks through programming thinking (observation-exploration-expansion-segmentation-development stage) and devise a plan to operate the company most efficiently.

You don’t need to learn a programming language to learn programming thinking. You can learn programmer thinking without having to learn a line of code.

Programming thinking is about building the power to think of new solutions to problems. In other words, it is not about teaching programming languages, but developing “thinking skills to structure and solve problems.”

I’ve been working in IT for over 20 years, and I’ve seen great programmers go beyond just the ability to develop software programs, they excel not only in programming, but also in how to approach and solve all problems. So, I observed how the programmer solved the problem, thought about how to apply it to the business, and came up with a methodology called “Programming Thinking”.