101–110 of 212 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I accepted your side quest. The first page of results are all comments on hacker news about Jamie Zawinski and where I gave up. Do tell…
This is supposed to exemplify my point: the attitudes of Mr. Zawinski may be questionable; however his contribution and his output are not questioned by anybody. We would all be worse off without these contributions.
And if you are 3 person startup and you are CTO , hire a DEV Team in [enter country].
code as a CTO But just for you to know , you are making a mistake, we all did.
I read all the time about folks who become a VP/CTO and stop coding. Management skills are not coding skills. I know it. But I can't for the life of me figure out why folks hang up their keyboards and let their first super power go to waste. You can be a technical CTO from start to finish. Treat your team and the company like a service that needs active contribution, maintenance, and on-call support; and also, get yo…
At VP/CTO level you don’t have time to contribute and maintain code. If you do, the VP or CTO title is probably symbolic, like when someone is a “CTO” in a team of 3 at a startup. The real problem is when people take early career roles that leave no time to code: They take architect roles where they just draw boxes on whiteboards and hop from meeting to meeting, or they accept a role labeled “tech lead” that is actua…
There is a lot of talk on culture fit. Most of the talk on "culture fit" is bringing up a hidden layer of discrimination, of one sort of the other - to the detriment of the companies that are applying these rules. Cultural openness is a factor of success, discrimination is leading into the opposite direction - if you ask me. > The best leaders track their success rate, are not afraid of admitting hiring mistakes, and…
That’s the cynical interpretation, but more often than not I’ve seen culture fit used to protect candidates from taking a job they’ll loathe.
At one of my first jobs they tried to ban anything that could be called culture fit from the hiring criteria. It led to a couple hires yo joined, hated the company, and quit within weeks or months. The first one was a candidate who emphasized planning and predictability and complained that past employers had moved too fast. We were a startup. Predictably, he hated it. But we were disqualified from voicing those concerns in the hiring decision process because it was “culture fit” and they were afraid it would lead to discrimination.
There were several other instances before the policy quietly went away and we were allowed to evaluate candidates for compatibility with our engineering culture once again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> use read replicas for BI with a good visualization tool Put up 2 or 3 read replicas, split your queries so writes happen to main and reads come from replicas (supported out of the box by many modern ORMs), and you can scale to millions in daily active users for most startup workloads. Really the hard part of BI is that folks who need the info don’t wanna learn SQL. The ones who can do SQL, will struggle to keep up…
> Really the hard part of BI is that folks who need the info don’t wanna learn SQL. Data analysts are fine with SQL though. Every "get into data analysis as a career" course will teach you SQL (about 70% of what the querynomicon teaches [1]). [1] https://github.com/gvwilson/sql-tutorial
Yes! I haven’t seen startups hiring these though. Somehow I always end up doing this as a side-gig on my engineering job.
Oh lordy, the "two crews" bifurcation fully written down. What a fantastic way to ship until it becomes far too expensive to ship anything good. Look, when we break the feedback loop back to the people who wrote the software in the first place, they get happier for a bit, you make some other people sadder for a bit, and then slowly your feature crew never want to be interrupted or bothered again and your customer cre…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It allows your feature team to remain 100 percent focused on the future, undistracted by customer support work. AKA "it allows your feature team to be completely oblivious to the horrors they unleash, and keep at it until the ship is solidly planted in the iceberg" Not talking about the conflicts it creates for merging between sales-supported feature teams and customer rep-supported maintenance teams. Given that th…
Further, I'm not sure what efficiency it provides overall. Is dedicating 20% of your team to support _that_ much different than the entire team spending 20% of their time on support? We've actually found our quality goes up massively when we force our engineers to deal with the problems in the features they ship, directly with customers. We still have dedicated front line support (that rotates weekly), but they run o…
I (n=1) would prefer to be answering support tickets for 2 week blocks, and know when the blocks are in my calendar, so that I can plan work around them, rather than trying to debug something while I am being pinged about unrelated stuff all day.
I read all the time about folks who become a VP/CTO and stop coding. Management skills are not coding skills. I know it. But I can't for the life of me figure out why folks hang up their keyboards and let their first super power go to waste. You can be a technical CTO from start to finish. Treat your team and the company like a service that needs active contribution, maintenance, and on-call support; and also, get yo…
At VP/CTO level you don’t have time to contribute and maintain code. If you do, the VP or CTO title is probably symbolic, like when someone is a “CTO” in a team of 3 at a startup. The real problem is when people take early career roles that leave no time to code: They take architect roles where they just draw boxes on whiteboards and hop from meeting to meeting, or they accept a role labeled “tech lead” that is actua…
I was an active developer from 1996 - 2018. Between 2016 - mid 2020 I started transitioning to team lead/architect roles with some coding until I did a pivot to cloud consulting specializing in app dev. First it was 50/50 coding/strategy until now where it is 10/90 coding/strategy talking to customers and leading teams.
I can tell you it was a lot easier finding full time jobs both in 2023 and 2024 as a “staff architect” at both product companies and consulting companies than regular old “senior” [1] enterprise software development jobs. Especially working remotely.
Every job posted for generic developers gets hundreds of applications and most of the applicants are probably good enough to do the job. I applied for hundreds of jobs between both times I was looking and heard crickets. They were plan B jobs that actually paid less.
On the other hand, in 2023 I had three offers for team lead/architect jobs in three weeks and one offer in 2024 based on replying to one internal recruiter that reached out to me.
Besides, I keep between 9-12 months of expenses in a liquid savings account outside of retirement savings. That gives me plenty of runway to prep for coding interviews if I had to.
[1] “Senior” roles at most non tech companies mean “you codez real gud” not that you operate at any different level of “scope”, “impact” or “ambiguity” than a mid level developer.
If you code you are not a CTO. if you have to code then You don't need a CTO. And if you are 3 person startup and you are CTO , hire a DEV Team in [enter country]. code as a CTO But just for you to know , you are making a mistake, we all did.
If you code you are not a CTO. if you have to code then You don't need a CTO. And if you are 3 person startup and you are CTO , hire a DEV Team in [enter country]. code as a CTO But just for you to know , you are making a mistake, we all did.
Also, Fractional CTOs are a thing ;) Some companies can benefit from a CTO who is not full-time: for example, many medium-sized publishers. The CTO role and its functions are still necessary even if the company cannot afford to hire a full-time CTO or would rather commit that budget elsewhere.