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

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

#113

Post by dopamean »

pixelmonkey wrote: post #38

I was CTO of a startup from pre-seed stage ($0 raised, bootstrapping) thru Series A + B stages ($millions raised, scaling). I then promoted a senior engineer to the CTO role, around the time that we had ~20-30 engineers organized into sub-teams with engineering leads. As part of that, I ran an engineering management book club internally for the new CTO and engineering leads (which was also open to any engineers to jo…

That sounds like a really awesome workplace you built there. Nice job.

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

#114

Post by belter »

skrebbel wrote: post #23
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 :-)

His productivity will shoot trough the roof, when it moves into deleting code.

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

#117

Post by dasil003 »

leetrout wrote: post #68
skrebbel wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. When building a startup you’ll find a lot of well-meaning people (in books or in person) who really do nothing but distract you. YC got it right, you should make something people want. Everything that’s not either making something or finding out what people want is just going to slow you down.

Too reductionist. You must "sharpen the saw". This takes many forms including adequate learning / training for self improvement as well as investment in your tooling that will pay dividends on delivering faster or with higher throughput. These are second and third system effects that require intention to monitor or measure but the effect is real.

Any advice is going to be reductive when measured against the reality of building a startup. While learning and continuous improvement are table stakes, I think the GPs advice is much better to get first-time founders overall. "Sharpening the saw" is likely to feed perfectionist tendencies, or send them into dopamine learning loops online. There's a reason that "bias for action" is treated as a highly valuable trait in founders.

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

#119

Post by dangus »

nsoldiac wrote: post #86
_jal wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...you just found one and talked to him.

not always a him

"They/Them" would be appropriate if we didn't know the person's gender or if they were specifically non-binary. However, in this case, we do know that this specific person is "he/him" thanks to the username and public profile, so the comment parent to yours was appropriate and your comment less so.

(Your comment is less appropriate because the analogy would be if you said: "Nice to meet you, Jim. Not all people in your position are men, though.")

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