I used to scoff at people skills too. I don’t any more.

Getting thousands of employees to all work towards a common goal is EXTREMELY difficult. Not to mention selling it to customers, investors, etc.

It doesn’t matter how technically proficient you are - you will fail if you don’t have people skills.

And people skills are far harder to measure, so we basically filter by success (which everyone knows is imperfect).

And there are far, far fewer people with the kind of people skills needed than people who can program a computer. Hence, pay is far higher.

> Getting thousands of employees to all work towards a common goal is EXTREMELY difficult.

Especially when there is no common goal.

The goal of a CEO is profits. As long as it goes up, everything is ok. As soon as it starts to go down: we have to sack people.

I don't get what you mean. There are people who are great at bridging the customer-engineering gap. (Although we don't know what Tom was really like with customers) There's skill to that kind of position. Bobs were the stereotypical consultants brought in to change things and cut costs without understanding the actual work. What does this have to do with defending CEOs?

We do know that Tom actually didn’t really do anything, all the real work was done by his underlings. Similar to what most CEOs do. Of course it’s not always true, but like Christine Carrillo in the article i think it’s not a stretch to say that most CEOs don’t do that much; certainly not enough to warrant being paid 1000 times what their menials make

> Although we don't know what Tom was really like with customers

The movie makes it quite clear, actually.

The Bobs were actually way better than the stereotypical layoff consultants. They even caught on the crazy management chain and the busywork generated by TPS reports. Sure they wanted to layoff good engineers, but doesn't invalidate the actual good findings.

> The movie makes it quite clear, actually.

Did we ever see him interacting with a customer? I don't remember that part and I can't find any clip of it. We see him in many other situations. We know he was not respected and was a weirdo in many ways, but that doesn't say anything about the quality of his customer communication.

He admits himself he isn’t actually the one communicating with the customer, it’s his secretary

I completely forgot that part, my bad!