Ask HN: What course should a CTO do?

#1

Post by netpenthe » Fri, May 11, 2018, 12:02 AM UTC

As a technical co-founder/programmer who's beginning to build the team (about 4-5 people now).

Feel like need to transition from programmer to software engineer / CTO.

I can choose which course(s) to do - looking for suggestions.

Ideally it'd be 2-10 day course(s), anywhere in world is OK.

Re: Ask HN: What course should a CTO do?

#2

Post by stevelaz » Fri, May 11, 2018, 3:03 AM UTC

I'd read managing humans, and other people skills books. You will most likely want to learn how to rely on your peers to build better software than you. Your job as a leader will be more important in your ability to make sure your team is doing the right thing rather than how they do it.

Re: Ask HN: What course should a CTO do?

#3

Post by ajeet_dhaliwal » Fri, May 11, 2018, 3:30 AM UTC

Personally I’d watch a couple of relevant YouTube videos/talks from carefully selected industry leaders and get on with the job. You’ll learn more doing and then when you start to notice you have blind spots or are weak at something take the intensive courses you need then.

Re: Ask HN: What course should a CTO do?

#4

Post by acovar » Fri, May 11, 2018, 5:43 AM UTC

I will recommend you to focus more on task management and architectural design. Your team expects guidance on what to build with clear expectations. I think the book Ben Horowitz, "the hard thing about hard things" has a good chapter on team leadership and defining expectattion this will help to be a better CTO.

Re: Ask HN: What course should a CTO do?

#5

Post by mindhash » Fri, May 11, 2018, 6:09 AM UTC

For first time CTOs, I would recommend courses or videos around hiring. You can figure out tech and working with people as you go. But hiring is what takes most of your time and harder to get right.

Re: Ask HN: What course should a CTO do?

#6

Post by heeton » Fri, May 11, 2018, 7:52 AM UTC

I made the transition a few years ago, and wished this article had been written back then - it contains 90% of what I needed to know. Hopefully it will help you too, even though it’s not a formal course.

https://github.com/webflow/leadership/blob/master/tech_lead....

Re: Ask HN: What course should a CTO do?

#7

Post by iosdevelprss » Fri, May 11, 2018, 6:37 PM UTC

mindhash wrote: post #5

For first time CTOs, I would recommend courses or videos around hiring. You can figure out tech and working with people as you go. But hiring is what takes most of your time and harder to get right.

educating yourself as a CTO is a must

Re: Ask HN: What course should a CTO do?

#8

Post by uber1geek » Sat, May 12, 2018, 2:36 PM UTC

Peopleware - Read it and re-read it every year.

Re: Ask HN: What course should a CTO do?

#9

Post by laurentl » Sat, May 12, 2018, 4:47 PM UTC

In addition to the other suggestions in the thread:

* meta: learn to know yourself if you don’t already. It’s half the battle. I took an MBTI course that was tremendously helpful; well-done career counseling can also help in that it can make you understand your intrinsic motivations, and from there figure out what you need to be happy.

* security training. These come in two flavors, operational and normative (usually some flavor of iso 27k). If you come from a dev background you’ll probably already have some operational knowledge (owasp top 10, sysadmin hygiene, etc) but it’s always worthwhile to strengthen it especially in areas that may be new to you (infra hardening, managing a fleet of PCs for non-technical users, etc). Normative might seem like bullshit at first but when well done is helpful to structure the way you think about security (like, what assets are you trying to protect, from whom, and at what cost)

* business training might come in handy to hold your own in meetings. At least be comfortable with how a business case works and what your company’s BC is. This will allow you to have more productive discussions with the PM and understand, from a business perspective, which features you should focus on.