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A CTO should be technical

blog.southparkcommons.com

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Re: A CTO should be technical

#241

Post by spoonjim »

dovholuknf wrote: post #10
spoonjim wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it still matters because of hiring. The type of people rewarded with promotion at the top tend to promote those people and so on down the levels. A nontechnical CTO will start promoting nontechnical people managers and eventually you will have an org run by MBAs.

Yes for sure. But those non-technical, big company CTOs are going to be hiring people who need to be good at hiring people. Those are going to be your VPs of engineering types. THOSE people will be 'more technical' at that point. Those VPs of engineering are going to hire directors and so on down the chain. As you descend - it matters more and more that they are good technically. So if you're at a 50k size company, t…

I mean it depends on what kind of company it is. If software development is the company's core activity I think that this kind of setup is likely to fail slowly.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#242

Post by firechickenbird »

IMO CTOs must have a broad knowledge of how things are done in all the fields, eg. web, mobile, backend, devops, nowadays ML etc. That way they can take more sane high-level and long term technological decisions. Otherwise you end up with a cto asking you to move everything on microservices for your 1k users app because he/she heard of a friend's company using them (based on a true story)

Re: A CTO should be technical

#243

Post by [deleted] »

mbesto wrote: post #201

> So let me put it plainly: the CTO/VPE/Engineering Director candidate should pass your coding interview. In fact, they should excel. I've interviewed over 300+ CTOs over the last 8 years. I don't think the author is saying this literally, but i'll bite - no the CTO doesn't need to pass your coding interview. CTOs need two capabilities to excel - technical ones and human resources ones. That's it. No need to get any…

[deleted]

Re: A CTO should be technical

#244

Post by sahila »

random314 wrote: post #153
warent wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Things are tough right now, but once we close this deal then we'll be in a much more comfortable position. Your role on this is critical to our success." Is this not a reasonable way of approaching it? It seems to be simultaneously honest and empowering. What lie is necessary? EDIT: slight revision

Compulsive liars cannot change their habits.

And gasp you may have to reward your worker because they truly are that valuable instead of reaping all the benefit for the cto.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#245

Post by omeze »

wpietri wrote: post #34

Is this what passes for management advice these days? > CTOs have to be very clear with everyone that if quality falls below a certain point then everything will be paused to focus on improving quality. This strikes me as almost Dilbertian. I think quality is hugely important, but I think don't think you can get it with dramatastic managerial showboating. I think it's something that you bake in with all sorts of prac…

I never worked at Dropbox, where Aditya was CTO, but companies like Databricks, Lyft, and Plaid all have code freezes for various quality-related reasons e.g. outages, post-mortems, severe bugs. Are all of these company's CTOs dramatastic showboaters, or is this a lever worth pulling when times call for it? These companies were all unicorns, decacorns at times as well.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#246

Post by dagw »

ArcMex wrote: post #226

I believe it’s better if they are. I once reported to a CTO whose bible was How To Influence People and Make Friends. He ordered a migration of 4 million records to be done in a weekend because he had promised the CEO “everything would be fine by Monday” but I had told him that that plan would require 5 days to put everything in place, even a rollback. The fact that he refused to hear me out when I pointed out the in…

I once reported to a CTO whose bible was How To Influence People and Make Friends.

On the flip side, I once worked with a CTO who was technical, but couldn't make friends or influence people. End result was that he couldn't get senior managers behind his ideas or plans and nothing he tried to do went anywhere.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#247

Post by dagw »

There is also a lot of nuance to 'technical'. I've seen people with over a dozen years of technical experience in field A become CTOs of a company in field B and just kind assume that things work basically the same since tech is tech. This rarely works out well. So beyond just being 'technical' in some generic sense it is important to understand domain and culture you are asked to be 'technical' in.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#248

Post by mjburgess »

wpietri wrote: post #206
ytpete wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you modify this to interpret "everything will be paused" as applying just locally to a single team owning a specific area or product, it sounds a lot more sensible. I've been on multiple teams that organically chose to try an approach like that when faced with growing quality debt. A CTO can globally foster a culture that is applied locally in concrete decisions.

Sure, if we talk about something he didn't say, it could be better. But even then I think it's a big mistake. The point of coding is to make things for people. If we stop making things for people and do something else, however virtuous that something else might seem, I think we aren't moving in the direction of long-term improvement. One of the biggest roots of low quality is high time pressure. So I'm fine throttlin…

That isnt the purpose of coding, no. That's its purpose for the first keystrokes, but thereafter, when a user has a product, it is to make that product an ideal experience for that user.

One imagines the vast majority of "coding" taking place on MS office for the last 30 years has not been to "make things", but to improve the quality of what they have made.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#249

Post by arnvald »

> So let me put it plainly: the CTO/VPE/Engineering Director candidate should pass your coding interview. In fact, they should excel.

People who work full-time as developers spend hundreds of hours practicing leetcode and hackerrank so that they can pass the interview, but a CTO who's 5 levels above and hasn't logged to Github for 3 years should excel at it? Come on.

I agree with the premise of the article, CTO should be technical, but I don't think that "technical" and "great at coding" are the same. One of the best CTOs I've had came from a product background. He was technical enough to understand the technical discussions and he was able to support his directors in hiring plans, technical decisions etc. but he wouldn't pass any coding test more complex than FizzBuzz. Still, he was great at his job.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#250

Post by jwr »

Having been a CTO (and not wanting to be one ever again): it is incredibly difficult to stay connected to technical details when being a CTO. To really feel and understand technical issues you need to write code. Not all code, but at least some, on a regular basis, encountering issues yourself. Fitting that into the schedule of a CTO is very difficult, as you will be expected to be on "management time", e.g. available at any time for any kind of meeting, chat, road trip, or phone/conference call. You can't set time aside for concentrated work.

And believe me, to be a good CTO, you do need to be connected to technical details and understand the tradeoffs. Just talking to other people who code is no substitute.

In my case, I decided I will never again want to be in a management position where I cannot spend a significant amount of time coding.

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