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Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?

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pcprogrammer:
Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills then they might deserve?

What is this title about you think?

Well it is about the praise we give to the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates for their technical abilities they might not have.

Sure they build successful companies which in it self is impressive, but do they have the actual technical skills that we think they have.

Take Steve Jobs, where would he have been without Steve Wozniak. What did Jobs bring to the table in making the first Apple. Furthermore we praise him for the GUI he brought with the newer Apples, but the fact is that it was people at Xerox PARC who developed the idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_interface

And without a lot of good people in the company to develop all the products they sell he would most likely be nothing.

Also take a look at what Steve Wozniak did. Was he brilliant? I don't know, making a computer like the Apple II could have been done by many of us. Take a standard processor, slap some memory on to it, a display system, keyboard interface and you have a computer.  And basic was not invented by either of the two so nothing to brilliant there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC

The same applies to Bill Gates. What did he actually invent? Not MS-DOS, because that was made by Timothy Paterson. https://www.britannica.com/technology/MS-DOS

There are many engineers out there with possibly better technical skills that actually brought a lot to the success of the big "guns" without getting any credit for it. And where would the big "guns" be without them.

Sure making a lot of money like they did is impressive, but making idols out of them just for that. I don't know.

This is not an attack on their personalities, just a simple question about whether they deserve the hail for their technical skills.

Brumby:
There is far more than technical ability required to bring innovation to the world.

magic:
Because in the world as it exists today their marketing skills are more valuable than your technical skills, of which they had next to none by the way ;)

CatalinaWOW:
The answer varies.  Jobs was never touted as a technical whiz.  But he did excel at marketing and also styling/understanding the market.  Wozniak was very good technically.  His floppy disk interface was very clever, not something that most engineers would come up with.  Sure, much of the Apple II was vanilla stuff, but the clever bits gave it an edge over the many other competitors at the time.  That and the recognition that to reach a broader market than the elx/comp sci geeks who were buying Altair and many similar products at the time.

Gates was a coder whose initial claim to fame wasn't inventing Basic, but coding a version that was usable and fit in the 16 or 32 kbyte memory space available at the time.  Not spectacular, but he beat others to the task.

I don't know which other big names you feel get more respect than they deserve, but in all the cases I am aware of they did one or more of three things that not every technical person can do at the drop of a hat.  One, they created a unique function by using things in a way not obvious and different than others had done.  Wozniak, Tesla and Armstrong (FM radio) are examples of this.  Two, they recognized a market that wasn't obvious to others and used average or better technical skills to create a product for that market Musk (Paypal). And finally, three they had the organization and persistence to develop and polish an idea until it is actually marketable.  The Wright brothers are perhaps the best example of this.  They weren't doing much of anything that others couldn't do or in fact weren't doing.  But they kept at it until their combination of minor improvements on existing ideas worked well enough to be useful.  Many of Musk's enterprises are examples of this.  The Falcon 9 rocket being an example of, as you say, strapping some rocket engines, fuel tanks and some guidance electronics together.

tom66:
In a great number of cases, the particular individual was just lucky.  Right place, right time, right connections, right skill set.  There's nothing in life that says someone has to succeed just because they are a good programmer.  And they need to be driven.  I know engineers/programmers who are quite comfortable taking a salary without risk every month, if you want to do something as crazy as start a company like Apple, you need to be prepared to live in a shoebox for a few years, and throw all of your time and effort into it, for maybe a 1% chance of success.

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