Did you pick up any management education along the way? I spent time getting a masters in public administration and management when I made the move myself, and found it invaluable.
How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
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Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
#12Did you have to get up to speed on al the details of fraud, risk, and FinTech? If so how, what resources did you use to figure it out? If not, did you hire expertise, bring it in-house, and only have to implement bits of it into Gusto? Second question: how did you determine to shift development from SF to Denver? What criteria went into selecting Denver over other areas? How did you figure out what to move their and…
Hey Brad!
I'd say it was a combination of hiring in-house experts (we did that to learn about payroll taxes), and lots of reaching out to people and not being afraid to pepper them with questions (for example, in the case of learning about the ACH system: https://engineering.gusto.com/how-ach-works-a-developer-pers...)
As for Denver, a ton of factors went into choosing it. Ultimately though, we just loved the people, talent, and culture in Denver so we went with that!
I'm doing great! It's so great to hear from you again.
Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
#13I am a CTO, going from 2 engineers to a total engineering org of approximately 20.
Much of my time is non-coding, but I don't believe you have to totally give it up. I try to leave a day per week free of meetings to code / review code. I keep some projects that, while useful for the company, can be worked on irregularly and slowly, and are not super essential to be accomplished quickly (which is why they aren't prioritized for the engineering teams).
Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
#14[deleted]
Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
#15Did you pick up any management education along the way? I spent time getting a masters in public administration and management when I made the move myself, and found it invaluable.
It's great to hear that you found the Masters invaluable! I personally didn't do any formal education myself beyond reading, finding mentors, workshops, some coaching, and experience along the way.
Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
#16> To accomplish this, I decided to fly to New York to hole up in a hotel room for three days to read a few highly-recommended management books.
> I decided to focus on growing Gusto’s engineering team, and not our code. The technical books on my desk starting getting replaced with books like Mindset, High Output Management, and The Score Takes Care of Itself — still three of my favorites today.
If the three books listed in the latter excerpt were not those three books you read in the hotel, can you please tell us what books they were?
Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
#17Given that you were essentially learning management while in the role, did you ever end up hiring people with prior management experience to report to you? What was the mentoring like for these folks - were there cases where your reports actually had more experience than you?
Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
#18Yikes, that open office picture looks like my nightmares.
Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
#19Sup Eddie. Besides books, did you go and ask people about how to be a great CTO? Who did you pick to ask, and how did you find those people?
Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
#20Given that you were essentially learning management while in the role, did you ever end up hiring people with prior management experience to report to you? What was the mentoring like for these folks - were there cases where your reports actually had more experience than you?
That certainly did happen. In fact, I would say its quite necessary for growing startups to continually hire people with more management experience than anyone else in the company. There isn't a sense of ego associated with that. Many of them are really just excited to be on this mission together.