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A CTO should be technical

blog.southparkcommons.com

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Re: A CTO should be technical

#321

Post by citizenpaul »

kelnos wrote: post #184
citizenpaul wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not really. My words were some people will hate you even if you do everything right. This was an example of a situation that was handled right but the person ended up hating me and slandering me for years afterwards. Just because I would not allow the company to fund their get rich quick scheme instead of their job.

I've even found people that I did not manage that got fired blamed me sometimes. Like all of mgmt was some evil cabal that conspired together to fire them cause thats what we really want instead of making the company money so we can all get out paychecks.

What people are doing is going off on a tangent of how they don't agree with how I handle the grey area stuff. There is a great deal of Silicon Valley worldview going on as well. The majority of the working world has lots of politics and pettiness going on along with power struggles and backstabbing. You cant be S.V. idealistic and keep your MGMT job in the middling business world.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#322

Post by citizenpaul »

uvesten wrote: post #272
citizenpaul wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a CTO once. Transparency is not your job. You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what everything else is just "rumors". If you don't they will start getting anxiety or looking for new jobs instead of pressing on. This could actually be the difference between what makes things fail or succeed. You're job is not to be transparent or honest. Its to make sure everyone stays…

I had a CTO like you once. Totally destroyed morale, made the best people leave, and created a toxic work environment where there was no trust in management at all. If that’s your goal, good work I guess.

>I had a CTO like you once.

Then you didn't have a CTO like me. I'm still in regular contact with most of the people that used to work for me. One actually just texted me this morning to ask how I was doing. Even though our lives will almost certainly never intersect again.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#323

Post by ttymck »

fareesh wrote: post #289

Dilbert moment I remember is from a few years ago I was presenting a proposal to create a web app with a bunch of front-end engineering requirements to the "CTO" of a large transportation company once. We covered topics like JSON-LD schema, HTTP/2, responsive images, asset fingerprinting, that the solution would include and provide etc. He asked us why we can't "build the website on wix".

> He asked us why we can't "build the website on wix".

This strikes me as a very effective question.

Even if the answer is "because wix can't do asset fingerprinting, etc", then the CTO now knows the limitations of wix.

And, it also leads to the question: "why are responsive images, asset fingerprinting, etc _absolutely essential_ to solving the business use case", i.e. Could we build a valuable product even without those technical details.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#324

Post by citizenpaul »

29athrowaway wrote: post #227
citizenpaul wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a CTO once. Transparency is not your job. You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what everything else is just "rumors". If you don't they will start getting anxiety or looking for new jobs instead of pressing on. This could actually be the difference between what makes things fail or succeed. You're job is not to be transparent or honest. Its to make sure everyone stays…

> "You're job" I could not even finish reading this comment. As a C-level leader in an organization, communication should be your strong card. It's unacceptable that you don't even know the difference between "you are" and "your". If as an employee I get an e-mail from a "CTO" consistently getting confused with such elementary, trivial shit, I would fucking resign immediately as that makes it evident that the organiz…

Good point, I agree.

I do know the difference though. I probably copy/pasted part of the comment around and missed that I changed the context. Shame on me for not proofreading my internet comment though. You should probably erase me from existence for my lack of vigilance as punishment...

Re: A CTO should be technical

#325

Post by citizenpaul »

danwee wrote: post #267
29athrowaway wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "You're job" I could not even finish reading this comment. As a C-level leader in an organization, communication should be your strong card. It's unacceptable that you don't even know the difference between "you are" and "your". If as an employee I get an e-mail from a "CTO" consistently getting confused with such elementary, trivial shit, I would fucking resign immediately as that makes it evident that the organiz…

I wouldn't judge so quickly, this kind of mistakes happen sometimes among non-native English speakers. In any case, CTOs don't do much, so the future of a company is not tied to the IQ of its CTO.

You do a solid job of feigning niceties for someone that seems to hold themselves so highly.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#326

Post by stormbrew »

citizenpaul wrote: post #318
drc500free wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point in my career, I think the #1 responsibility for everyone above VP is to maintain everyone's fantasy of a stable paycheck in exchange for stable work. Once you peek behind the curtain of where your firm's cash comes from and where it goes, you have to live with a deep existential fear that you could mess up a bunch of people's lives... and you don't want others to have to live with that.

Finally someone that seems to actually have some real life mgmt experience replying.

It's very convenient to believe that everyone replying to you who disagrees with you has no management experience, and the one lone voice giving uncritical agreement is the one person who does.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#327

Post by citizenpaul »

warent wrote: post #121
citizenpaul wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>all will be good when we release Well I've literally been in the position where this was true to close a deal so we could stay in business. What would be the best option in your opinion? Risk a critical person leaving right then and loosing the customer and then losing everyone job? Or lying and telling them we are all ok just keep on doing your job and don't listen to rumors? You are espousing false virtue/armchair…

"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

I wasn't trying to write a business book but what you wrote is fine usually for the senior level employees that get how business works and probably took the job with the understanding of the weight of their position. However you will also have fickle entry/low/mid level employees that don't have the maturity to accept the realities of the business world.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#328

Post by jbverschoor »

qudat wrote: post #306
arnvald wrote: post #249

> 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 shoul…

I think this just demonstrates a fundamental flaw with our interview process more than anything else. We are modeling interviews based on companies with insane hiring demands (FAANG). At our little 20 person company we have removed most of the BS leetcode style questions and have shifted towards a more discussion based interview process. Effectively we have switched from quantitative to qualitative where the question…

Not only that.. a lot of developers, and “management” that wants to be involved with the tech side think they’re big tech in terms of:

amount of data to be stored. Amount of traffic / users. Amount of servers and services you need. Architecture, scalability, infra, etc etc.

Where is 99% of the cases a small group of people would suffice, no micro services, and in terms of infra, a cheap VPS is more than capable enough.

People just don’t have a clue, bc they don’t understand what actual work needs to be done.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#329

Post by hef19898 »

johnnymorgan wrote: post #292
hef19898 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agree on giving reasons. And more often than not there is room to discuss them. Also, from time to time, it doesn't matter weather or not we agree with those. And then there are those moments were there is no time to discuss. Good leaders know to tell those appart, and professionals can accept it. Unfortunately, this combination, good leaders being in charge of professionals, is rarer then I'd prefer.

Too rare but when you get it, it's gold baby

Solid, 24 carat gold.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#330

Post by jjav »

sercand wrote: post #232
jjav wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I saw terrible decisions made by CTO and CIO While a CTO needs to have grown up in the technical trenches to have credibility, a CTO should not be making any technical decisions anymore. If they are, that's a red flag for a CTO who can't let go and keeps micromanaging.

It depends on the company size. On a small startup with 10 people and a company with 1000 people have different CTO definitions and roles.

Yes, certainly. In a tiny startup the CTO is just a lead developer with more stock options than the others.
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