Managing a group of people is not synonymous with doing the actual knowledge work of researching and developing innovations that enabled this technology. I find it hard to believe that the contribution of his management somehow uniquely enabled this group of engineers to create this using their experience and expertise.
A captain may steer the ship, but they're not the one actually creating and maintaining the means by which it moves.
> A captain may steer the ship, but they're not the one actually creating and maintaining the means by which it moves.
And yet virtually everyone will go along with a statement like "The captain sailed the ship across the ocean" or "Captain Kirk charted the Gamma Quadrant" or whatever, so I'm not sure how this serves as an objection to the original phrasing.
Depending on the work, an equal level of technical competency can be very beneficial for leadership to have, if not required in some situations. To debate his contribution as a counterfactual exercise without the context of his leadership is entirely non-productive. HN is always quick to dismiss leadership, despite evidence of good and poor leadership being tautologically debated about nearly constantly here. A talented group of engineers can self-organize, but their collective technical expertise does not translate to business acumen.
The crux of the debate appears to rest on the fact that context matters. If an engineer says to another engineer "I built the spam detection system", it is understood that they mean they either wrote the code or had some direct part in producing it. If an executive says to another executive "I made the Mac", neither is interpreting that as them literally building the thing. They know they are in leadership, the meaning is assumed to be "as a leader".
A captain may steer the ship, but they're not the one actually creating and maintaining the means by which it moves.