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A CTO should be technical

blog.southparkcommons.com

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Re: A CTO should be technical

#351

Post by random314 »

citizenpaul wrote: post #343
random314 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However you will also have fickle entry/low/mid level employees You need to read that sentence again. Your comments are very revealing about you and not about CTO level work as you are imagining.

My comments are very revealing about the reality of the work world at mediocre aka most companies. If you get a big enough group of people there are going to be some people with machiavellian tendencies or at least some that read bad advice on the internet about how to get ahead at work and try to apply it with clumsy gusto. You will look like a real fool to your boss the CEO if you are giving information to these ty…

> You are deluding yourself if you think there are no bad apples out ther

Please don't put words into my mouth.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#352

Post by random314 »

citizenpaul wrote: post #345
sahila wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And gasp you may have to reward your worker because they truly are that valuable instead of reaping all the benefit for the cto.

Thats mostly a CEO trait. Remember CTO,CFO,COO,CIO, ect are all just jobs. You ultimately report to the CEO, whom ultimately reports to the investors,stakeholders, capital partners, b2b relationships and so on. For the record I gave 100% of bonuses I had awarded to my staff and 0% to myself the entire tenure.

Who awards bonuses to themselves?!

Re: A CTO should be technical

#353

Post by rsrsrs86 »

I’ve seen hundreds of millions in funding go down the drain in companies with daring requirements versus lack of technical creativity. In all cases the CTO, if there was one, was not technical and commanded no respect from the engineers.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#354

Post by tonyarkles »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #215
citizenpaul wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. FYI They will lie to you regardless.

> Yes. FYI They will lie to you regardless. If you create a culture where you lie, then people will lie to you. If you create a culture where you are honest, people will be honest back to you. There's nothing more powerful than going to your team and saying "Look, I fucked this up. I need your help". Honesty is disarming. I'm in a field where I manage scientists. If people start to lie to me or even start to bend the…

> So no. Your employees don't need to lie to you. Mine come to me regularly and explain what went wrong. Judgement-free. And we do deep dives to prevent problems in the future.

I had a junior EE come and find me while I was on a smoke break to immediately inform me that he had mixed up two connectors and had accidentally put 48V into a piece of kit that could only handle 12V, resulting in $10k worth of blue smoke. That’s what a high trust engineering org looks like. He could have lied about it, I didn’t see it happen, “I dunno I went to reboot it and it didn’t power back on”.

That’s what I want to see. He was open and honest with me because I don’t feed him bullshit.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#355

Post by dijit »

austinjp wrote: post #174
dijit wrote: post #23

I just became a CTO. So, let me bear my thoughts. Since July of this year I've been CTO for a small games company, I've worked in this industry before in a more specialised role but this is much broader scope. I've gone from being responsible for 1 person to 10 which will likely become 50 by the end of next year. I'm terrified. I'm terrified because I feel like I will let my reports down. I'm terrified because a lot…

I'm curious about why and how you've become a CTO? Presumably, you don't have to do it if you don't want to. If that's true, be nice to yourself and remember that on a regular basis :) What you've described is pretty much the way many CTOs would describe the job. Don't worry. Treat it like any new discipline. Seek out expertise and learn from it. Make notes and crib sheets and read them regularly (they might be about…

Apologies for not responding sooner.

The reason I became a CTO is three-fold:

Firstly, I was recommended for the position by the managing director of a large (the largest?) Swedish games company, so I figured it was a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Secondly, I asked my old CTO if it was a good fit for me as I’d been a manager before and I felt I preferred IC, I also have an abrasive way of communicating which worried me greatly, his response was that the abrasive parts of my communication style will melt away because it is bore out of frustration.

Finally; I have worked in meritocratic cultures but only when there was significant external political pressure from the publisher. Theoretically I could replicate that culture but without the political cruft; additionally I would be in a position to set the company up with long-term technological investments and partnerships: which I was trying to do before but managers are usually focused on short term goals.

> Find a mentor if you can.

> Don't burn out.

> Don't be a jerk (ignore the more outspoken comments in this thread, you are clearly not well suited to sociopathy, congratulations).

> You will not be able to please everyone all the time. You can't be everyone's friend all the time. But you can probably be decent to everyone nearly all the time.

This is good advice and I appreciate it greatly, I will wear these words going forward.

Thank you. :)

Re: A CTO should be technical

#357

Post by samhuk »

ambicapter wrote: post #278
samhuk wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to that list, and somewhat related to your first point: Never built anything technical of any quality. A coach that never played can't teach.

Hard disagree. A good coach only needs to see the players on the field, notice the things that wins game, and figure out the way to motivate their players. Don't need to have played the game, though it helps. I'm thinking of one of the best coaches in the world, who played the sport at an unimpressive level as a teen...but at a young age he watched his father work as an assistant coach. That's where he learned his sk…

> notice the things that wins game

> motivate their players

These are made so much easier if you have "played the game" that you pretty much end up back to the original argument of it being a requirement if being "a coach" to remain competitive. There of course will be outliers to this, like your aforementioned "coach that never played", but why deliberately base your point on an outlier?

> "must hit X bar of quality", where X is some arbitrarily high level

Quoting myself, I said "of quality", i.e. something that is reputable and, relative to some reasonable and well-known industry standard software development principles and benchmarks, of quality. I wouldn't say it's totally arbitrary.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#358

Post by spopejoy »

nickelcitymario wrote: post #51

I’m a marketing director, not CTO, so take this with a grain of salt. But I believe leaders should be “good enough” in a wide array of disciplines. Certainly the disciplines involved in their department, but also, frankly, every aspect of the business. Meaning a CTO should also be good (not great) at sales, marketing, cash flow, customer service, user experience design, etc. Being well rounded means being able to gar…

There's a huge difference between a Dropbox and an Uber here.

Dropbox is a technology company. This is famously a place where deeply technical leaders can achieve competitive advantage. The whole company exists to support the tech, so if the tech fails, bad.

Uber (and most startups really) don't do tech, they use tech to drive sales. Of course the tech is important but it's a solution not a driver. Here I agree that a "well-rounded" tech-average CTO can be advantageous.

Tech strategy is where everything converges. If products literally live or die by it, you better have a crack technologist at the top.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#359

Post by koffiezet »

mbesto wrote: post #201

> So let me put it plainly: the CTO/VPE/Engineering Director candidate should pass your coding interview. In fact, they should excel. I've interviewed over 300+ CTOs over the last 8 years. I don't think the author is saying this literally, but i'll bite - no the CTO doesn't need to pass your coding interview. CTOs need two capabilities to excel - technical ones and human resources ones. That's it. No need to get any…

> doesn't know that his core infra team just wrote something in Rust

Sorry but that is something he should know. That directly affects technology radar and roadmap, HR and a bunch of other stuff.

Re: A CTO should be technical

#360

Post by f1shy »

arnvald wrote: post #249

> 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…

A CTO has so many things under him, which are not coding... There are architecture decision, in the company where I work, also HW, for example. He cannot excel at every technical interview in the company.

Of course has to be technical, hast to have a huge background in development, and been in many of the areas he will oversee... but you cannot ask him to excel at every one.

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