RE: Los Alamos or Lawrence Livermore kinds of places
These national labs are run by contractors and not the Federal government. They compete vigorously for the best scientists and engineers and managers.
As for management of technology, this is a growing and increasingly complex special field of business administration -- just like accounting, marketing, manufacturing, and finance. The general purpose business degree is hardly an advantage for someone who wants to get ahead in large complex organizations. It is true that two of the great CEO's in tech companies are not college graduates at all, but Gates was a supercoder, and Dell is one of the greatest sales people of all time. Of the others I can think of, a doctorate in engineering is common, but many of them came up through manufacturing (e.g. Barrett -- a former academic) or R&D (Grove -- only a part-time academic). Others have MBA's (e.g. McNealy -- I don't know if he can code or solder at all). It will always IMO be difficult for one with either an engineering or business education to learn the other part of what is needed to head a successful tech company. To start one from scratch apparently requires a great technical idea or competence (like Noyce and Moore and Gates and the Sun founders had) and brilliant business leadership (Sun again, and Grove who developed in time to save the company from disaster in the 80's and set it on its run to greatness.) One of the problems of the future for tech companies is that brilliant researchers will be discouraged from moving above team management, and persons who enter into non-tech business jobs will have to struggle to get the tech experience they need to become successful tech managers. Remember that Noyce and Moore (and the other six) got it wrong the first time with Fairchild, and decided they had to run the business themselves for it to succeed in the way they wanted. Also, they hired Grove. |
