Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?

#21

Post by ksplicer » Fri, Dec 29, 2023, 10:46 AM UTC

mobiuscog wrote: post #19

Whichever books you read - some great suggestions in the comments so far - please treat them as advice, and not religious texts. So many managers and higher fail terribly at being effective because they believe all they need to do is encourage/enforce the practices in the books on the engineering teams, and that is the path to failure and the death of morale. Take the books as guidance, but listen and engage with you…

People are notoriously bad at identifying what actually led to their success. Career advice authors even more so.

Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?

#22

Post by krishadi » Fri, Dec 29, 2023, 10:46 AM UTC

On a side note, when I had my startup and was the CTO, a lot of advice I got and also what I ended up realising was that my priority and goal was to build an amazing `Tech Team`.

Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?

#23

Post by skrebbel » Fri, Dec 29, 2023, 10:51 AM UTC

elmarschraml wrote: post #11

Depends a lot on your situation: Does "CTO" mean you are the tech lead of a small (single team) engineering organization? Then everything written for staff engineers applies. E.g I've heard good things about "Staff engineer's path" by Tanya Reilly. Does "CTO" mean you are leading an org that is too large to be hands-on with tech, and need to build an effective structure and culture? Then I second the recommendation f…

And maybe CTO means “the founding programmer of a new startup” in which case my advice would be to stop reading and start coding :-)

Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?

#24

Post by gorbachev » Fri, Dec 29, 2023, 10:56 AM UTC

Books can help, but if I was you, I'd try and find a good mentor.

Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?

#25

Post by onion2k » Fri, Dec 29, 2023, 10:57 AM UTC

Technical founders are not CTOs. At least, not for a long time. A CTO role defines the strategic vision for the org. You'll have a vague idea of that as a founder but until you nail the product and where it fits in a market it won't really matter too much. Focus on executing and getting traction instead.

Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?

#26

Post by pknerd » Fri, Dec 29, 2023, 11:00 AM UTC

So, does a CTO need to know about:

- Dev/ML/X Ops

- System Architecture

- DB design? etc?

Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?

#27

Post by oneplane » Fri, Dec 29, 2023, 11:06 AM UTC

At a startup phase, I'm not sure there is anything that is strictly speaking a "CTO" task, except the paperwork. And once you get big enough for it to matter, the same rule applies as for a CEO: the CxO you need for your first million is a different one you need for your 100 million and different yet again for your first billion.

There is of course a GitHub list for this: https://github.com/kuchin/awesome-cto and perhaps the best way to find out what you need is to check things off of that list that don't actually have anything to do with what you're actually working on. Role names generally have very little meaning on their own, it's all about context.

Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?

#28

Post by lnsru » Fri, Dec 29, 2023, 11:08 AM UTC

You need to book communication and/or good sales course. As CTO you’re into politics, not into tech. Ability to communicate clearly and steer the conversation is your skill number one. Tech background is nice to have, but not really useful. You will hire people for that.