No post body was provided.
A CTO should be technical
291–300 of 367 posts
Re: A CTO should be technical
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Because I say so" is a terrible way to communicate why a thing is being done. In senior positions it is definitely necessary now and again to pull rank and tell people something is being done despite their protests, but I don't think I've ever found a situation where I couldn't articulate why that decision had been made. People may disagree with that decision, hell, sometimes I've disagreed with the decision I'm com…
Fully agree on giving reasons. And more often than not there is room to discuss them. Also, from time to time, it doesn't matter weather or not we agree with those. And then there are those moments were there is no time to discuss. Good leaders know to tell those appart, and professionals can accept it. Unfortunately, this combination, good leaders being in charge of professionals, is rarer then I'd prefer.
Too rare but when you get it, it's gold baby
Re: A CTO should be technical
#293> So let me put it plainly: the CTO/VPE/Engineering Director candidate should pass your coding interview. In fact, they should excel. People who work full-time as developers spend hundreds of hours practicing leetcode and hackerrank so that they can pass the interview, but a CTO who's 5 levels above and hasn't logged to Github for 3 years should excel at it? Come on. I agree with the premise of the article, CTO shoul…
Wouldn't any half-decent CTO put a stop to using leetcode exercises for interviewing job candidates?
Re: A CTO should be technical
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it may be a policy for some larger firms, even if there is little available talent in the local market. Here in Sydney there are next to no C++ experienced developers (I am hiring), yet some firms insist agencies make candidates do leetcode tests even before someone actually from the firm will even talk to them.
If they're gonna make you do Leetcode anyway, I actually would want to do it as early as possible. An initial phone screening would be good, but as much as I don't like Leetcode, it's less exhausting than multiple rounds of interviews before getting a challenge that you mess up on. Fail fast, fail early, as they say.
It should be prominently listed in the req as a hard requirement: "Must complete leetcode, no exceptions." Then we all know what's what. It's up to management to make decisions about how hard it wants to make recruiting for itself.
Re: A CTO should be technical
#295> So let me put it plainly: the CTO/VPE/Engineering Director candidate should pass your coding interview. In fact, they should excel. People who work full-time as developers spend hundreds of hours practicing leetcode and hackerrank so that they can pass the interview, but a CTO who's 5 levels above and hasn't logged to Github for 3 years should excel at it? Come on. I agree with the premise of the article, CTO shoul…
Developers spend hundreds of hours practicing leetcode and hackerrank? Are they actually good coders? And that's required to pass an interview? I feel so out of touch. I haven't interviewed very many candidates, just a couple dozen maybe, but I've never heard anyone mentioning leetcode or hackerrank. If they'd admitted they'd admitted they spent that much time on there, I'd be seriously questioning why they didn't sp…
I have been asked exactly one contrived coding question over the forty years of my career. It happened during an interview with a startup in late 2003.
I was able to answer the question. Many did not, but the process was more about how you handled yourself through the process, how you communicated with the interviewer as you walked through the problem, than it was about reaching the actual solution. I know several people, bright people, that were hired there even though they never solved the puzzle.
After I got the proper solution, I asked the person that administered the quiz "Is this an indication of what kind of code gets written here?" He just started laughing and saying "no, no no". Because I would not take a job at any company that actually wrote code like that.
That interviewer ended up being my first manager, and we had a good work relationship. It was a great few years of my career.
Re: A CTO should be technical
#296> So let me put it plainly: the CTO/VPE/Engineering Director candidate should pass your coding interview. In fact, they should excel. People who work full-time as developers spend hundreds of hours practicing leetcode and hackerrank so that they can pass the interview, but a CTO who's 5 levels above and hasn't logged to Github for 3 years should excel at it? Come on. I agree with the premise of the article, CTO shoul…
Developers spend hundreds of hours practicing leetcode and hackerrank? Are they actually good coders? And that's required to pass an interview? I feel so out of touch. I haven't interviewed very many candidates, just a couple dozen maybe, but I've never heard anyone mentioning leetcode or hackerrank. If they'd admitted they'd admitted they spent that much time on there, I'd be seriously questioning why they didn't sp…
Larger and more well-known companies do leet-code style programming challenges. I recently interviewed for a job in a ride hailing app company and they directly recommended practicing leetcode problems, even sent me examples of leetcode problems to practice solving. My sample is not big (it's 2 companies I iterviewed with recently), but it definitely feels like the industry is converging on this practice of testing leetcode-style problem solving in interviews. Community even built "workout plans" like this: https://www.grind75.com/
I'm 11 years into the profession. Solving leetcode is somewhat different from the problems I solve at work, so I struggled at first and had to practice, and practice a lot. I have yet to find out how useful this is outside of job interviews, but my brain started to forget some topics from CS after doing so much web stuff and it was a good way to remember these and practice problem solving.
Re: A CTO should be technical
#297> So let me put it plainly: the CTO/VPE/Engineering Director candidate should pass your coding interview. In fact, they should excel. People who work full-time as developers spend hundreds of hours practicing leetcode and hackerrank so that they can pass the interview, but a CTO who's 5 levels above and hasn't logged to Github for 3 years should excel at it? Come on. I agree with the premise of the article, CTO shoul…
Wouldn't any half-decent CTO put a stop to using leetcode exercises for interviewing job candidates?
If you can't code LC medium, then the odds of you being a good programmer are pretty low. That's the conventional wisdom. Everyone is playing safe and adhering to conventional wisdom.
Re: A CTO should be technical
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
This misunderstands the role of CTO which is to be a single point of responsibility and leadership for all the deliverables in engineering. And a lot of times CTOs are actually CPOs as well meaning they are also the final desk and driving force behind the strategic direction of new development as well. Middle management overhead is real but this isn’t really an example of it — there is always a CTO and a CPO but not…
Let me guess, CFO's also don't need financial expertise?
They're not saying they don't need to have technical experience, they're saying they don't need to be a current technical domain expert. Of course they need to understand how software products are created, but they don't need to know to optimise your DB queries.
That may not be the case at a small 5 person startup, but at a larger scale with a full division underneath you shouldn't be getting involved in the nitty gritty of why the database fell over. You should be making sure the engineering teams are being given the space to have those discussions, learn from it, and improve.
The CFO of a similar sized company isn't sitting down and running payroll. They're talking about strategies to re-organise budgets to enable product or territory expansion. Or they're looking at the decisions leaders of a potential acquisition have made, and whether they stack up to the top level figures.
Both roles are fundamentally business and people focused roles. They require the holder to take leadership of a specific area (technical, financial, or what have you) and run it efficiently to server the business goals. That requires you to have a good understanding of the area. The more you have the more likely you are to succeed, but you won't be writing code as a CTO. In the same way the CFO won't be running the tax calculations for payroll that month. Not once you're past 50 or so people in your division.
Re: A CTO should be technical
#299Exactly what I had in mind. This is an attitude that sees workers as mindless automatons whose sole purpose is to keep themselves busy. a terrible management approach. The advice that it is acceptable to be despised only deepens the ditch. When things aren't going well, your staff members may be able to tell, and bald-faced lies like this will hasten their departure.
Re: A CTO should be technical
#300Eh, much like CEO, this is strongly dependent on what kind of org you are. It's roughly the Jobs/Cook paradigm, and "Cooks" don't really need to be technical at all.