When I first became a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of a startup, I was young and inexperienced. I was technically capable, had led multiple softw...
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I remember my first dev job turned into de facto CTO role because no one else in the company knew about tech. I was barely 18 at the time and I hated it. I quit within 3 months and all the points you made really resonated!
Hope you have nice day!
Nice insights put in an interesting way.
Insights two and four, about understanding beyond functional skills and integrating into a process are two things I am working on recently.
If you are that CTO now, how would you approach the different roles that you needed to play at that startup?
Thanks! I am no longer working as CTO of a startup, I am now working as a senior engineering manager at an enterprise software company. If you're interested, you can read more about a day in my life these days: eisabainyo.net/weblog/2020/09/03/a...
Great insight!
I come from a non-startup background but my experience is different, yet the same. I've been a CTO of an established medium-size business for about 12 years and came on-board with the background of a senior developer, like you.
Our IT team is small because IT is not our core product. We are a manufacturing company, and the role of IT is to support manufacturing, through internal IT, network support, DevOps, and internal software products.
I find that I've been a hands-on CTO in the same way as you were for a long time. I wish you published your post sooner :) Your insight #2 hits very close - My biggest problem was for a longest time, an inability to let go of system or infrastructure, especially the one that I built, once I hired a capable team member. Also, the feeling that I need to know as much if nor more about each and every system my team works on so that I can be their technical resource, got in the way. Took me a while to realize, that a "bonus feature" of a CTO, not a hard requirement. The main job of a CTO is to provide vision & strategy, project management, support, resources, and organizational help to the team. Functional expertise in 1-2 fields is necessary, but it can't get in the way, of the actual job.
Im also interested in more specific details on what you'd do differently. I'm currently in this same position and trying to navigate these same waters.
Hi Zach! I am no longer working as CTO of a startup, I am now working as a senior engineering manager at an enterprise software company. If you're interested, you can read more about a day in my life these days: eisabainyo.net/weblog/2020/09/03/a...
Thank you for a nice and thorough article.
I started to wonder how much more valuable it makes a developer who also understands and actually embraces the points you brought out :).
Definitely, I used to be a developer who only cared about the beautiful code. I wrote an article about how to be an exceptional developer by caring more than just code. I will share it here on dev.to when I have a chance to syndicate some of my old content soon.
True some of thisgs are just a reflection of me couple of years ago... Learnt through my mistakes and I believe kept my patience. But moral of the story should be "one should be happy in whatever they are doing"
Really awesome article I think the hardest part is delegation is your from a IC role and to focus on the strategy plus the vision to make it work.
Good. Nice.
Great read, thanks for this!
Hi! Thanks for sharing, I really enjoyed reading it 👏 👏 👏