221–228 of 228 posts
I came up with a story that intuitively shows the difference of doing the seemingly exact same thing on different levels when I lived in the SF Bay Area - where I had ants in almost all apartments I lived in during the summer. The story is about KILLING ANTS. (Note: I lived in mostly peaceful coexistence with "my" ants - they had their roads through my living room and I ignored them, unless they started to crawl arou…
Is that a valid cultural paradigm? Are management jobs always "better"? Should they get paid more because they are so much better and more desirable positions to have?
Sometimes this attitude seems like a remnant of a feudal age where the management positions were held by nobility (our betters). Certainly some of the pay inequalities are now forming the basis for civil unrest.
The craftsmen are the true heart of the companies production and IMO the rest of the team should be focused around supporting the craftsmen rather than the craftsmen focused on supporting the management. (regardless of your product)
I think our culture is a little broken.
I'm surprised that no-one has suggested getting a VP Eng alongside you. http://avc.com/2011/10/vp-engineering-vs-cto/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on your skillset, but indeed we are hiring devs for our Madrid office. We are not ready for remote yet. We pride ourselves, among other things, in eating all the crap at the top. Required Skills: C#. Caveat: We want people that like learning new technologies, as we do use some other tech stacks other than .NET's. We will train you if you don't know it yet, as long as you are interested and capable.
Could you help me relocate? Inside EU. I don't know C# very well, but I worked with F# and also learned about some 110 other languages ( https://klibert.pl/articles/programming_langs.html ) and never considered stopping to learn new ones. (Mostly just testing if it's really that easy ;-))
Find out what you REALLY want. Find your motives. Find the underlying essential motivation. That's much deeper than coding or not handling crap. Those are superficial symptoms, not what makes you move. Find a good professional coach that can help you with finding this out. Pay money for it. You probably can spend several thousands $$$ on this. Not that it needs to be that expensive, but $1000-$2000 is easily spent. I…
I just read something along the same lines on the way to work this morning: https://medium.com/code-like-a-girl/why-i-left-management-th... The author was in a similar spot, and chose to go back to the tech track. Her takeaways were: What gives you energy and what drains you? How do you feel accomplishment? What drives and excites you? Answering those three questions honestly will give you a better idea on what kind…
I'm not sure about your pay structure, but if you are a CTO you definitely have power to change things. I think you should do that. If computing is what you love there is no better place than to be a CTO. You may review code, even write some modules and dictate how things should be done. And you should do it so that the system is stable with less fire. If you are not capable of doing so, you should hire someone who is capable of doing just that.
Email me if you want to talk privately.
First of all, congrats on the promotion.
You need to ask yourself, was coding what made you leap out of bed in the morning or was it that you were building something?
If it was coding then you need to go back to your old role. Please repeat to yourself this is not a failure despite what popular media and the start-up bro culture tells you. If you find a job and role that you love you are beating 90% of the workforce and win at life!
If it was building then you might still be able to make this CTO role work, just in a different way than you are used to.
Forget about technology, you are now a people manager. People are now your tools to build something. Fighting fires and dealing with everyone's crap is usually a sign of some kind of micromanagement. Have you placed yourself in the middle of everyone's decision making process? Are you their road bock for getting stuff done? This is often a result of giving your team tasks to do instead of goals.
Activities describe how people spend their time, whereas goals are the results that they seek.
Give each team member a goal and some kind of structure on how they can make their own decisions to achieve their goal. For example you can tell everyone any decision that takes less then half a day to implement they can decide. Anything that takes more time than that they should discuss with you. Your goal is to set their goal and then get out of their way. You need to run interference between them and distractions from other parts of the company. Check in with them regularly to mentor and coach them to achieve their goal. Can you empower team leads below yourself to do some of the mundane management? When I worked for a performance management company I posted this over on Quora on goal setting. https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-a-goal-an... Setting a goal changes the conversation from them coming to you with problems to coming to you with ideas and solutions.
One lesson I learnt when dealing with other managers, departments and up the line is that you have to over communicate. Everyone is mad busy in a start up and they will not remember what you discussed and all agreed last month. You almost need to market yourself, your team, goals and achievements to get their buy in. Run some regular workshops to get further buy in from them.
Your depression may stem from the feeling that you are not doing a good job more than the role itself so keep that in mind.
I have gone through the painful transition myself from doer to manager and I have made all the mistakes :) Design and marketing is my area, not tech. Happy to answer any questions you might have alan at spoiltchild.com
Alan
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…
I'm building a martech company right now and this is exactly type of people I hope to gain, someone who knows how the tech really works while also understanding the needs of the business and our clients to make the right decisions. They don't need to code everyday but having a grasp of how ad serving works, how logging and reporting is done, how attribution occurs through cookies and other identification, etc. would all help to make them more informed and capable at producing value for our clients rather than turning products into undifferentiated mush that add no value, like the rest of the industry.
Or maybe I'm just that technical founder who will always have to mix the two disciplines and make the call myself - just wish there was a way to delegate this.