A CTO should be technical • Hacker News Board

Re: A CTO should be technical

#181

Post by kelnos » Tue, Sep 27, 2022, 1:17 AM UTC

citizenpaul wrote: post #127

warent wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be quite a lot wrong in this post in my humble opinion... In brief, this reads as: * Allowing rumor/politics to become malignant through deceit rather than healing through truth * Dismissing responsibility for other people's livelihood because "hey its not my fault they didn't save money in case I throw them in the guillotine" * Using lack of information as a reason to lie, rather than just telling you…

You are ignoring a hard reality. Other people probably want your job. If you look weak/uncertain/outofloop it will encourage them to come after you and give them ammo against you. Making your job at best more difficult or at worst a full blown power struggle. Sorry but the reality of human nature is tough.

If you truly think that a person can't be honest and trustworthy, while simultaneously being strong and confident, then I really don't know what to tell you. Disclosing hard truths doesn't mean being "weak and uncertain".

I know workplaces aren't democracies, but there's no question that I'd vote for the straight shooter (even if their own position in the company is weakened by that trait) over someone who plays the political game well but lies to their reports.

Hell, I would vote, with my feet, if I had to.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#182

Post by topspin » Tue, Sep 27, 2022, 1:17 AM UTC

yowlingcat wrote: post #66

What's incredible (and frankly horrifying) in this blog post is the complete lack of anything pertaining to what /kind/ of company the CTO works at. Surely, that must be important; a large company that sells a non technical product may need a very different CTO from an enterprise software company, who may need a very different one from a quantitative trading find. Along those lines, I find the lack of connection to a…

> Surely, that must be important

Certainly. That you noticed this aspect is deliberately omitted is very insightful; it's not really possible to discuss the matter intelligently without this information. CTO of a grocery chain is far different than CTO of an aerospace company. You can try to believe otherwise all you want, but you'll always come up wrong; the real world is complex and can't be abstracted away by titles.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#183

Post by xedrac » Tue, Sep 27, 2022, 1:18 AM UTC

dijit wrote: post #23

I just became a CTO. So, let me bear my thoughts. Since July of this year I've been CTO for a small games company, I've worked in this industry before in a more specialised role but this is much broader scope. I've gone from being responsible for 1 person to 10 which will likely become 50 by the end of next year. I'm terrified. I'm terrified because I feel like I will let my reports down. I'm terrified because a lot…

The worst CTO I ever worked for thought he was the expert because he "cut his teeth on assembly" in college. He indirectly micro-managed everyone with a "goal setting" farce. You had to submit very specific goals each quarter. He would then revise all of your goals for you, and give them back. They were a curated list of tasks that you had to accomplish. You would then be graded on those tasks and publicly shamed. He was so proud of his acronym "SPEED" and believed he was a great culture shaper. I've never worked in a more toxic environment, and never in a less productive one. We would have been 10x more productive if we didn't have a CTO at all.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#184

Post by kelnos » Tue, Sep 27, 2022, 1:28 AM UTC

citizenpaul wrote: post #87

pvorb wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eventually some of those reports will hate you as well even if you do everything perfectly. Its inevitable from being in charge. You may not find out till running into them years later and they just shrug you off when you try to say hi. Maybe they simply found out that you kept lying to them?

That was not the reason. I know its hard to understand if you are never in such a role. People can be very irrational and will look to blame someone in charge when bad things happen. Even if they are the cause of those bad things. I had one guy that got obsessed with crypto and was doing crypto trading instead of his work, not showing up/logging in, not making deadlines. He went off on me for like 30 min when I fired…

> I had one guy that got obsessed with crypto and was doing crypto trading instead of his work...

I think we are all very obviously not at all talking about the kind of situation you describe.

I left a company a little over a decade ago where the CEO and CTO (both co-founders) were lying to us about the company's situation for the better part of a year (which was longer than half the company had been employed there). I fortunately haven't had the chance to run into them since then, but I would absolutely give them the cold shoulder if I did. And that's because of what they did. I put in 80-hour weeks (including many weekends)[0] for over a year at that place, and they repaid me with a middling salary and worthless equity (after all common stock got wiped out less than a year later when the company got sold to one of the investors for peanuts and scraps).

Anyway, the one "nice" thing I can say about that CTO is that after they had a layoff (half the company), and I didn't get laid off, I went to the CTO and volunteered, and he let me go with the 4-week layoff severance package, which gave me a much-needed month off while I found another job.

(Speaking of startup equity, I'm just glad I wasn't quite out of college during the original dot-com crash, when colleagues I would meet a few years later ended up underwater on the loans they were encouraged to take out in order to exercise their company stock options. I can totally imagine wide-eyed 22-year-old me falling for a garbage scheme like that.)

> People can be very irrational and will look to blame someone in charge when bad things happen.

And sometimes blaming the person in charge is correct and rational.

[0] All stuff I will never again do for any company after that experience...

Re: A CTO should be technical

#185

Post by jklp » Tue, Sep 27, 2022, 1:36 AM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #177

jklp wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a lot of responses to this comment, especially these lines: > Transparency is not your job. > You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what > This will 100% require lying or being non-transparent at some point. To add my 2 cents I kind of agree. When I first got into management, I didn't realise how many fires they were, or priorities I needed to balance. Initially I thou…

I hope that's what the original poster who you quoted meant, because I don't see all that much wrong with the examples you mention. No, there's no need to engage people in discussions about things if it doesn't really impact them, or they can't really jump in and help the situation. However, in the absence of some legal requirement to keep quiet, if some employee got wind of one of those situations, and came to you a…

Yeah for sure completely agree. Tbh I didn't think too deeply about the scenarios, they were more to put context around what I meant by "fires", and how not mentioning them (which some might consider lying) is necessary sometimes to steady the ship (though if a team member asked I'd let them know what's happening).

I do think scenario #1 is interesting to talk about though.

I.e. If I was that manager receiving that news, I wouldn't outright tell the devs and say "it could be crunch time for the next 6 months", which might cause a panic and devs will start looking for other jobs.

Instead I'd call a meeting with leadership / sales, see what was sold and if there's any flexibility on deliverables with the client. If we need more resource, is it worth finding funding to hire more staff, or maybe postpone another project to get this higher priority one done.

Once that's resolved then I can think about delivering the news. Maybe it's a non issue (e.g. a new team is spun up to handle the project and someone gets a promotion to head the team), maybe it's crunch time (in that case it's time to have a difficult conversation with the team), or maybe the client is flexible on delivery (so it's business as usual).

Again, I could see how some managers would be uncomfortable not telling their team everything (and potentially cause unnecessary panic) - but I think that's part of management, knowing what level of detail your team are happy with, knowing what you can / cannot handle, and knowing how to delivery good / bad news and sometimes having to be the bad guy.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#186

Post by kelnos » Tue, Sep 27, 2022, 1:36 AM UTC

citizenpaul wrote: post #114

warent wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious to know where the statement "real life is not fair" is coming from / what it's referring to.

> do you want an opaque company where politics drive individual success >you want a transparent company where employees respect their leaders and where the best insight wins? The comment I replied to has very startup company silicon valley skew to it naive of the majority of the world. Very few of us are in any position to determine or change the political/cultural/driving forces of a company we have to work at. Usua…

> CTO is not a powerful position at most companies.

This I do agree with. Many CTOs don't actually have the entire engineering organization under them in the reporting chain (at a reasonably-mature company; not talking about a startup where the CTO is often one of the co-founders and runs engineering), so they have no real power to get other people to do what they think should be done.

At best they have an "Office of the CTO", or perhaps run the company's software architecture group (if the company even has one), and then they just have a tiny army of people who try their hardest to convince other teams to do things that aren't in their roadmap and would mean pissing off their bosses if they took them on. Not fun!

Re: A CTO should be technical

#187

Post by kelnos » Tue, Sep 27, 2022, 1:39 AM UTC

random314 wrote: post #152

citizenpaul wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. FYI They will lie to you regardless.

My reports have lied to me very rarely, and I have never had to lie to my reports. For the reports that lied to me, I managed them out of my team irrespective of their work performance. I have quit jobs where my manager lied to me. It is really really easy to tell when someone is lying. You seem to live in some alternate dystopia where everyone lies to each other. How many of the companies that you have worked at hav…

Yeah I'm really confused about this guy. I get that the world is not black and white, and conditions aren't always ideal... but I absolutely do not put up with the kind of dishonesty he's seemingly advocating. Perhaps not everyone has the luxury to be so picky, but... damn, I really have not gotten the impression (in my experience, and in the experience of friends and acquaintances) that this sort of bullshit is that common. At least not at successful, healthy companies.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#188

Post by tootie » Tue, Sep 27, 2022, 1:43 AM UTC

My company has opted not to have a CTO and instead have a CPO (Chief Product Officer) and the VP of Software is one of their reports. Honestly, I think it kinda makes sense. You're products are your products, not your tech stack.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#189

Post by dijksterhuis » Tue, Sep 27, 2022, 2:07 AM UTC

nordsieck wrote: post #62

scarface74 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had two jobs where I reported directly to the CTO - the first as Dev lead with people management responsibilities and the second as the de facto “cloud architect” that was responsible for the “application modernization” initiatives. My second CTO was very technical and up to date the first wasn’t. The only difference between the two day to day was with the second one, I could use terms without defining them firs…

> My second CTO was very technical an up to date the first wasn’t. The only difference between the two day to day was with the second one , I could use terms without defining them first. They both deferred to my technical judgement and I worked with the understanding of how to align my initiatives with the company’s. > I work with CxOs all the time in consulting now. I have no problem getting my ideas through CxOs or…

> whereas a non-technical CTO would have as much defense as I would at jiffy lube when the tech asks me if I want my fluids flushed. It kind of sounds like a scam, but I really don't know.

I am genuinely wondering if I need some jiffy lube for flushing those fluids of mine.

It... sounds like... a thing... that people... do?

Re: A CTO should be technical

#190

Post by skipidarink » Tue, Sep 27, 2022, 2:10 AM UTC

warent wrote: post #180

skipidarink wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider that you're advertising yourself as the type of person who absolutely must be lied to in order to maintain morale. I've been close to situations where the ICs did their absolute best and it was a total waste because of politics outside of their control. Do you tell them that so-and-so highly-respected person was shit-talking them because of an unrelated agenda and invalidated all of their work? Or do you tel…

Frankly if this actually happened, I would do neither. Just tell my IC "I'm not sure why your work was invalidated. Let me look into it for you." and then address this as a grievous issue on behalf of my IC with the leadership. If leadership doesn't fix the problem then just resign in protest. EDIT: It's now occurring to me that there's probably different schools of thought here. Yes, I've resigned in protest on beha…

> Just tell my IC "I'm not sure why your work was invalidated. Let me look into it for you."

And so you take your first step down the path.. "I'm not sure" is a lie here.