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Ask HN: CTO wants me to leave

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Re: Ask HN: CTO wants me to leave

#291
Call an early board meeting and aim for disciplinary action against the CTO. Founders don't get kicked out by employees. You also need to establish leadership power within the company as a founder vs being pushed around or treated like a code monkey.

Even CEOs can be removed from their high horse should there be collusion here between the CTO and CEO. If you feel this may be the case, seeking some legal advice so you can throw powerful words at those colluding should rattle the bird cake a bit. Just don't bring emotion in.

Founders are key to any company. Roles change. Part of a growing company. Founders keep the fire burning. Any smart investor will tell you the same.

Re: Ask HN: CTO wants me to leave

#292
I think the first question to ask yourself is "What do YOU want to do?"

If you did the coding from scratch to bootstrap your product but don't see yourself as a developer in the long term, then it is all fine: you find yourself other responsibilities in your company (and there will be many to take care of) and let your CTO take care of the developments and hires in the tech team.

On the other hand, if you did this to actually learn to be a good developer reuse that skill later (eg. launch another startup later) then you fall into the questions answered in other replies: is it political or is it only about code quality? (If it is about code quality, maybe your CTO is a jerk saying it this way, but for the sake of your product, it can be logical that you'd be out of its developments...)

As from my own experience, my guess is that you are in between those two situations. In my case, here are the reasons why I was:

- it was good fun bootstrapping the product with little constraints (small team, little production code, few processes, 100% reliability not mandatory etc.): I want to keep doing this

- it can be useful to gain experience into the getting big (team, code base, user base etc.) even if it is less fun

As for now, my best answer to this dilemma is to:

1. know you skills really well to know your value

2. keep innovating as much as possible: when being an entrepreneur (cofounder), your first required talent is not to make sure your code is 100% clean/safe etc. neither is it about having hard processes, but to create new things, to trust your ideas and to make them real. As a matter of fact, YOU cofounded your startup, not your CTO, so remember you have this skill and USE IT!

Re: Ask HN: CTO wants me to leave

#293
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, somewhat :-) There are people whose contribution is horrible but it's rarely confined to the quality of their code. It's more about being able to lead the company in directions that are ultimately wasteful in some way or other and not being able to change direction when the time is right. That leadership may be expressed in code, but the code is as much or more a symptom than the root cause. With basic QA…

Well, my understanding is that developer's experience changes the shape of the probability distribution of excellent/horrible contributions. But it is always a distribution. And that it is difficult to accurately distinguish between excellent/horrible contributions without hindsight.

I find that as I get more experienced, I'm more aware of how much of this huge discipline I don't know, and how many mistakes I've made in the past, and I'm much less likely to call myself a "good coder".

When I was younger and slapping shit together any old how, I thought I knew it all.

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