121–130 of 228 posts
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Cough solo founder. > The only truly successful technical leader is the founder,
Elon Musk wasn't even a founder at Tesla, let alone 'solo founder'. He joined as financier/chairman after R&D had begun and then took over as CEO some time after that.
This sort of thing happens surprisingly often-- the typical solution is to approach the CEO/board and seek a transition: quietly open a search for a new CTO and you find something that matches your passion. It's better for everyone: startups are no place for people without deep passion.
hope this helps!
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> The mid/senior leadership of the best known companies hires all thr available techie MBAs. This is false, and also misses the point. I went through two recruiting cycles at HBS (Harvard Business School), which is one of the largest (~1000/yr) and most representative business schools. I did not see a single position advertised which required actual engineering experience. I was also one of three people (in 1000) who…
Strongly doubting the assertion that it is easier to become a Google VP as a coder than a product manager. Product managers are responsible for the product and its P&L which is much more suited as training ground for VP than being a coder, in my opinion
There are idiosyncratic and systematic ways to consider this statement.
My personal belief is that it would be an easier path because I know myself to be very good at building products and supporting engineers, and relatively less interested in market research & networking.
In a more general sense, it's pretty easy to get a rough count of the number of product-oriented VPs at Google on LinkedIn, then count how many have PM backgrounds and how many came up through engineering (divided by the ratio of PMs to engineering managers). I did that analysis two years ago when I was considering Google, and it came up strongly on the side of engineer.
I'd be particularly interested to know if this has changed since, or if internal/better data suggests otherwise!
What I'm about to say may be considered harsh, but I promise I don't mean it to be. Quit. Just leave. Go back to coding. It's obvious you don't enjoy management, there's no shame in admitting that. Rather than inflict your misery on the rest of the team, get back to your wheelhouse where you can be happy, your team can be happy, and ultimately your company (current or future) can be happy. I have worked in a job wher…
Thank you for this, it's the way my mind has been leaning but it's good to hear. I realize my original post makes it sound like I had no idea what being a senior manager might involve which is just not true. I understand a lot of fire fighting and dealing with problems is par for the course I just didn't know if I'd enjoy doing that or not. How are you supposed to know until you try? :) I also felt like I'd have way…
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tl;dr: If there's no reason to get an MBA as a promotion-track engineer, then not only will none of your promoted engineers will have MBAs, none of your promoted MBAs will have practical experience being a great engineer. They wouldn't, of course. And that's really the problem. If you don't have mid-level technical managers with MBAs, you don't get to promote/hire VP-level technical MBAs. An MBA does teach a lot of v…
So why don't we, as an industry, talk to the Universities, and say that we really need a new program, let's say a TechMBA? (Or for marketing purposes, call it a TeMBA - that really rolls off the tongue :) I'd think that there would be some interest around this from the universities, and business is really crying out for this too. From the Uni viewpoint, it is another product they can leverage, whilst still using ther…
Flip it around: if Google opened up a new role for "Active engineers with MBAs", and presumably a few others followed suit, a top school or two (GSB/HBS/CBS/etc) would create the curriculum & recruiting plan to fill it. (Most likely Google could do this together with a school, they tend to have very close relationships.)
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An MBA provides only one thing: the opportunity to stop doing engineering. Do you want to stop coding/building things, and instead build teams & business? Then do an MBA. There really is a lot to learn; it's not the irrelevant piece of paper it's often made out to be. The usual caveats apply (right school/program, work hard, etc.) Do you want to be a higher-impact engineer? Don't do it. Apply to YCombinator, build mo…
It also provides access to an alumni network.
Executives are more helpful than most give them credit for. If you're a credible contact with real experience, and authentically ask someone for input or advice, most are happy to chat.
The thing about the vaunted "HBS network" is that if you're qualified to get in to HBS, you're extremely likely to be otherwise credible; those who wish they had access to the alumni network also tend to not have enough meat on their CV to get access either way.
I personally suspect that the most important networking aspect of an HBS degree is just humanizing executives and learning how to communicate with them. If you've got those two things down, actually connecting is much easier.
tl;dr: in your situation many people go off and get an MBA. Don't do that. There's a reason there's only one CTO in HBS' 60,000 person alumni database (I am she.) I was a very hands-on CTO for years after a decade of coding, and broadly enjoyed it. But as the teams I managed grew it became increasingly unfulfilling. When you're CTO, you're often excluded from business decisions which have a bigger impact on your team…
As an exceptional case, you can get into a large tech company like Google/Microsoft and thus enjoy a higher position while still being able to do what you enjoy (coding and technical stuff).
I was faced with this same dilemma when I quit my day job in a large multinational company and started freelance programming. As you said, there are career roadblocks in most companies when you are more technically inclined than managerial. Besides, there is no large employer like Google/Microsoft/etc. in my country, so freelancing is my only option.
I think the key when you achieve product market fit is filling the roles in your technical organization with stronger leaders than you, and stepping out of those management positions. Plus, you can learn from and partner with these people.
If you're a technical CTO, and want to code more than manage/build a team, then hire/promote a VP of Engineering with strong soft skills to grow/manage your team. If its the reverse, hire/promote a VP of Engineering who's technically stronger.
If you're constantly being pulled into engineering battles, hire/promote an architect you respect to negotiate.
If you're running engineering meetings (ipm's, retros, etc), hire/promote a SCRUM master or equivalent.
If you're battling sales, operations or marketing, hire a Director of Product Management with solid communication skills. That person will 'fight' your battles (and probably love it!).
If you're putting out fires in production, hire/promote a Director of QA. They'll work on designing systems to catch those bugs.
If your infrastructure goes down a lot, hire/promote a senior devops engineer.
On the engineering/coding front, I find it super helpful to rotate into teams and pair one-on-one with engineers. You get exposure to their day-to-day code battles/challenges/environments, the tech decisions at the lowest levels, the ability to code/manage daily and respect with your team. You can then prioritize stories/epics to fix problems that you see across your organization that plague a technical team like debt, environments, knowledge gaps, etc.
Don't step away, stay positive and solve for the organization you want to lead.
tl;dr: in your situation many people go off and get an MBA. Don't do that. There's a reason there's only one CTO in HBS' 60,000 person alumni database (I am she.) I was a very hands-on CTO for years after a decade of coding, and broadly enjoyed it. But as the teams I managed grew it became increasingly unfulfilling. When you're CTO, you're often excluded from business decisions which have a bigger impact on your team…
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I would have thought UPS - and similar companies - would be considered competitors, which are no small fries! But, perhaps I'm looking at the wrong layer of the onion? And perhaps the layer you're referring to/hoping to operate in is n degrees removed from that. In any case, good luck! +1!
tl;dr: different markets & different needs It's not hard to get a dedicated fulfillment service once you've hit a decent size (say ~10k/day). But it's a very intensive sales process with long-term commitments. They also tend to be both opaque and hard to integrate with other systems. Most use end of day EDI (yes, the 30yr old standard), some of the more "modern" ones have multiple drop times/day. So major fulfillment…
There's plenty of us, little guys that need logistics/fulfillment and the options just suck. There's a huge space between starting (when you can do it yourself with UPS/equivalent or even standard post) and when you hit a few thousand packages per day (when Fedex and similar is a decent option).