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How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers

engineering.gusto.com

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Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers

#81

Post by jacquesm »

seibelj wrote: post #13

I 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 prior…

You're not going to like this advice, but I'll give it anyway.

There is nothing more irritating than a CTO that continues to code. For one it will seriously disturb the team dynamic because you are going to set the standard for everything, whether you like it or not and if you've hired smartly (better at the job than you would be) you've now dragged down the whole team with you.

Also, you are going to be there part-time as a coder, and whoever ends up drawing the short straw to review your code will be very much aware that they are reviewing the work done by a c-level exec. That review will be less than a similar review done on the work done by a peer.

So if your company is dear to you leave your coding for some hobby project and allow the people you have hired to do their very best under your guidance.

Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers

#82

Post by jacquesm »

seibelj wrote: post #60
yarper wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Giving up coding is what you do for your team, so they don't have to deal with the half finished B grade work you did inbetween doing the serious shit they can't do

Wow! What an extraordinarily unhelpful and bad attitude you have

No, you have the bad attitude. You're getting some good advice and you are responding in a way that shows that you are not open to input.

Which is exactly why you should stop coding.

Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers

#83

Post by volaski »

enraged_camel wrote: post #47
dang wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be great, but there's a structural limit: people running successful startups don't have time to write about it, while people who have wound down their companies do. When a company is going strong and HN sees a post like this, it's usually because they're hiring :)

>>people running successful startups don't have time to write about it This is both offensive and incorrect. Offensive because it implies that if someone manages to find the time to write about how they are running their company they probably aren’t successful. Incorrect because the startup world is in fact full of leaders who do manage to find the time to write about how they run their companies (kalzameus comes to…

it's offensive only because you choose to be offended, it actually tells more about yourself than parent.

> people running successful startups don't have time to write about it, while people who have wound down their companies do

tell us what kind of mental gymnastics you have to go through to go from above statement to come up with such a twisted interpretation as "it implies that if someone manages to find the time to write about how they're running their company they probably aren’t successful". Since it's HN, I'm sure you can show how you came to that conclusion, in logical expression.

Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers

#84

Post by knappe »

seibelj wrote: post #60
yarper wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Giving up coding is what you do for your team, so they don't have to deal with the half finished B grade work you did inbetween doing the serious shit they can't do

Wow! What an extraordinarily unhelpful and bad attitude you have

To be honest, you're not yet at the scale where this much of a concern. You're either "flat" and about to need to put in structure or you already have it. If you already have the structure in place, then you have at most 4 direct reports and at worst 2 (ideal team sizes being 3-5).

I say this not to downplay the work you've done, but instead to put it all in perspective. You're in the `11-50 Engineers: Clinging to coding.` stage.

Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers

#85

Post by awad »

cabaalis wrote: post #56

We went from 1 engineer (me) to 4 last year. So I'm in the 2-10 stage. I coded prototype and first X customers, which has become literally 20X in the past year. I still code most of the time, and the primary problem I am encountering is being willing to transition technically difficult aspects of the product. This has to happen, as I am finding myself becoming a huge bottleneck.

The old cliche to work your way out of a job really resonated with me when I made this transition. It is natural to want to take on a task for yourself and to think you're doing your team a favor by shielding them from details you have a mastery on. But, once you get into the mindset of enabling everyone by focusing on training and knowledge sharing, you find that people are far more capable than perhaps you give them credit for and in fact do them a disservice by not giving them more reign. Worst case, you get a bit of sanity back from being less of a bottleneck. It may not seem like it, but most of the time the people applying tight time pressures are ourselves (customers also have more patience than we give them credit for), and it is generally worth it to invest in teaching someone to fish, as it were.

Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers

#86

Post by lostctown »

jiveturkey wrote: post #73

to offer a counterpoint to the lovefest going on here, TFA is almost completely uninteresting. the role changed exactly as one would expect and predict. the only interesting part is reading about the humble beginnings, the dedication and belief. what would actually be useful to read about is failings, where OP failed in transition to manager and how he overcame those failings. I mean there's a paragraph in there but…

Mirrored my thoughts exactly. Maybe some take to the role more naturally but I've found it quite a struggle. These rosy eyed pieces certainly don't help.

Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers

#87

Post by jcheng »

yarper wrote: post #48
stronglikedan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reporting hierarchy is there for a good reason. If you report to multiple people, you're the one that's going to have a bad time when they're not aligned with each other, each trying to give you a different list of priorities.

Why don't they know what's important and what's not?

In a larger organization, "knowing what's important and what's not" at all times can be practically a full time job in and of itself. A lot of engineering teams like to protect individual developers from meetings and conference calls so they can focus on development, but that necessarily means developers will be missing context.

Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers

#89

Post by justAnotherNET »

legohead wrote: post #64

I was an engineer #1 hired by a "CTO" and we grew to 50 engineers. His story/growth didn't really change much, however. He was a coding machine, a true "10x engineer", and programmed day and night. He even started up a second company while working on the first. He built both codebases from scratch, and even re-wrote the first company's core codebase at one point. He did attend exec meetings and make all major technic…

Are you me? We’re at 30 now and I know exactly what you mean.

Re: How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers

#90

Post by timr »

volaski wrote: post #57
timr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But you don't deserve to tell others what you think is the right thing when only thing you've achieved in life is failure. You gotta earn it by taking the lessons you learned and applying it to come to a true success. These people are worth listening to." I am mostly neutral on what you wrote, but this is just wrong. If you think that only "successful" people have valuable stories, you're drawing a very bright-line…

The reason why your advice is not as useful as you think is because chances are, if you google around, most of that lesson would be already out there. Don't take this the wrong way I mean no offense. I'm sure you've learned a lot of lessons and I'm sure they're all valuable lessons, just saying most of what I read online nowadays are basically rehash of what these failed entrepreneurs heard from someone else, who pro…

"The reason why your advice is not as useful as you think is because chances are, if you google around, most of that lesson would be already out there. Don't take this the wrong way I mean no offense. I'm sure you've learned a lot of lessons and I'm sure they're all valuable lessons, just saying most of what I read online nowadays are basically rehash of what these failed entrepreneurs heard from someone else, who probably heard it from some other successful person."

I don't take offense, but you're wrong. You have no idea what kind of advice or knowledge I have, but you're jumping to the conclusion that you've heard it all before.

This thread is extremely off-topic, and it feels silly to try to convince someone to listen to other people, so this will be my last post. Good luck.

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