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Ask HN: I don't enjoy being a CTO. Now what?

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Re: Ask HN: I don't enjoy being a CTO. Now what?

#161
Somebody has to do these things. They can be done more or less well. This has a big impact on your company's success and on the happiness of your team. Those are the only good reasons to endure the hardships.

You're coming to understand what executives do and how that's necessary in a company, at least until humans find better ways of working together. This isn't something you really see clearly when you're the CEO because you're above the fray. And this isn't something you see when you're an individual contributor if the executive of your group is doing his or her job well.

People are paid in part based on how poorly a job can be done. The CTO is a role where real catastrophes are possible. It's a job the rest of the business often doesn't understand well, managing a team the rest of the business understands even more poorly. It's easy for bad choices to do a lot of damage to a company over a long period.

If you're the rare individual who can bridge both worlds and do this job well, then it's likely your company and your team won't find anyone who can do this better. And if they have to look, it's quite possible they'll find someone who does it a lot worse, makes your team miserable, and drives the company into the ground.

The reason to do the job is to make the company successful and to make the lives of those on your team better. If you believe enough in the company's mission, the other executives, and your team, then you'll figure out the rest.

Humans can endure a lot of hardship if it fits within some context we find worthy. It's not an easy job. But if it's a worthy cause then carry on.

Re: Ask HN: I don't enjoy being a CTO. Now what?

#162

tl;dr: in your situation many people go off and get an MBA. Don't do that. There's a reason there's only one CTO in HBS' 60,000 person alumni database (I am she.) I was a very hands-on CTO for years after a decade of coding, and broadly enjoyed it. But as the teams I managed grew it became increasingly unfulfilling. When you're CTO, you're often excluded from business decisions which have a bigger impact on your team…

>there's no real place in the world for a highly technical business leader.

Bill, Larry and Sergei, Musk and Bezos did ok

Re: Ask HN: I don't enjoy being a CTO. Now what?

#163
post #162

tl;dr: in your situation many people go off and get an MBA. Don't do that. There's a reason there's only one CTO in HBS' 60,000 person alumni database (I am she.) I was a very hands-on CTO for years after a decade of coding, and broadly enjoyed it. But as the teams I managed grew it became increasingly unfulfilling. When you're CTO, you're often excluded from business decisions which have a bigger impact on your team…

>there's no real place in the world for a highly technical business leader. Bill, Larry and Sergei, Musk and Bezos did ok

Bezos is not highly technical. Very smart, and grasps concepts very quickly, but not highly technical by any stretch.

Re: Ask HN: I don't enjoy being a CTO. Now what?

#164

tl;dr: in your situation many people go off and get an MBA. Don't do that. There's a reason there's only one CTO in HBS' 60,000 person alumni database (I am she.) I was a very hands-on CTO for years after a decade of coding, and broadly enjoyed it. But as the teams I managed grew it became increasingly unfulfilling. When you're CTO, you're often excluded from business decisions which have a bigger impact on your team…

> Unfortunately, there's no real place in the world for a highly technical business leader.

So how do you account for Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Larry Page, and so on?

I think you meant to say "there's no place at Dronecorp for a highly technical business leader". It's logical that Dronecorp should hire Harvard MBAs who score high on agreeableness and are skilled at showing each other powerpoints.

Re: Ask HN: I don't enjoy being a CTO. Now what?

#166

tl;dr: in your situation many people go off and get an MBA. Don't do that. There's a reason there's only one CTO in HBS' 60,000 person alumni database (I am she.) I was a very hands-on CTO for years after a decade of coding, and broadly enjoyed it. But as the teams I managed grew it became increasingly unfulfilling. When you're CTO, you're often excluded from business decisions which have a bigger impact on your team…

> Unfortunately, there's no real place in the world for a highly technical business leader. So how do you account for Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Larry Page, and so on? I think you meant to say "there's no place at Dronecorp for a highly technical business leader". It's logical that Dronecorp should hire Harvard MBAs who score high on agreeableness and are skilled at showing each other powerpoints.

See the last statement in the comment, "The only truly successful technical leader is the founder..."

Re: Ask HN: I don't enjoy being a CTO. Now what?

#167
post #162

tl;dr: in your situation many people go off and get an MBA. Don't do that. There's a reason there's only one CTO in HBS' 60,000 person alumni database (I am she.) I was a very hands-on CTO for years after a decade of coding, and broadly enjoyed it. But as the teams I managed grew it became increasingly unfulfilling. When you're CTO, you're often excluded from business decisions which have a bigger impact on your team…

>there's no real place in the world for a highly technical business leader. Bill, Larry and Sergei, Musk and Bezos did ok

All of those people are founders.

My thesis is that there's no place in the world to be hired as an engineer w/ an MBA (which is comparably compensated to and inaccessible to "just" engineers or "just" MBAs), and no place within traditional hierarchies.

Re: Ask HN: I don't enjoy being a CTO. Now what?

#168

tl;dr: in your situation many people go off and get an MBA. Don't do that. There's a reason there's only one CTO in HBS' 60,000 person alumni database (I am she.) I was a very hands-on CTO for years after a decade of coding, and broadly enjoyed it. But as the teams I managed grew it became increasingly unfulfilling. When you're CTO, you're often excluded from business decisions which have a bigger impact on your team…

> Unfortunately, there's no real place in the world for a highly technical business leader.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. As I understand it, the history of Silicon Valley was written by highly technical business leaders. They might not be writing code, but they're sure providing technical guidance - sometimes on a highly granular level...(e.g. famously Bill Gates micromanaging date/time storage in new language development when MS was a billion dollar company).

I contest that if you're highly technical, it's very difficult to step away from that knowledge (especially when you're seeing things going wrong). Not a bad thing?

Also - congratulations on becoming a founder! Best of success to you!

Re: Ask HN: I don't enjoy being a CTO. Now what?

#169
post #162

tl;dr: in your situation many people go off and get an MBA. Don't do that. There's a reason there's only one CTO in HBS' 60,000 person alumni database (I am she.) I was a very hands-on CTO for years after a decade of coding, and broadly enjoyed it. But as the teams I managed grew it became increasingly unfulfilling. When you're CTO, you're often excluded from business decisions which have a bigger impact on your team…

>there's no real place in the world for a highly technical business leader. Bill, Larry and Sergei, Musk and Bezos did ok

Sure, but you're citing the most outlying of outliers as examples.

Re: Ask HN: I don't enjoy being a CTO. Now what?

#170
As a technical leader, the biggest hurdle I faced personally was understanding how to measure and improve myself in the right ways.

While success in an engineering role can generally be described as "write good code" (with all the nuances therein), technical managers are measured on totally different things, and it isn't obvious how to improve most of them.

When I transitioned and realigned myself to these things, my outlook changed, and I started really enjoying leadership roles:

* Embrace the idea of being hands off technically. I have never seen a hands on technical manager that worked out well - politics will always come into play. Instead, encourage friendly inter-team debate, which you can coach and steer into a healthy dynamic to make the right decisions. Feel satisfaction that the team you build creates better engineering than you could alone.

* Focus on helping your team lead fulfilling careers and lives. See in them what they could become in 10 years and help them achieve it, even if it sometimes conflics with your short term interests.

* Build amazing products - The leader is way more instrumental in this than often credited.

* Create a great team environment that people want to be a part of.

* Get a seat at the business table - you should absolutely be a big part of the product roadmap. Done right, eventually you should have sales/customer teams coming to you for advice and input like 'Customer X wants Y, what do you think?'

* Create great communication flow - make sure everyone else knows how important your team is, and help your team see how what they do contributes, and how the market/product is changing and why.

On your comment about fighting fires and other managers - you can change this. These things make any job unpleasant. I strongly recommend reading The Phoenix Project to get some ideas from an IT perspective - it can easily be read in a weekend and addresses exactly these common problems.

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