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I have worked with a lot of CTOs or similar. Sometimes CTO is a title that can approve large budgets and an effective CTO is actually their direct report. Bein

I have worked with a lot of CTOs or similar. Sometimes CTO is a title that can approve large budgets and an effective CTO is actually their direct report. Being a CTO is less about technology and more about understanding the global technical landscape, accounting and legal implications to large budget decision making. If I, for example, choose Microsoft as a vendor will that impact our Pacific market and if so what is the cost benefit? These are not trivial choices. To an extent a lot of the job is risk mitigation, reducing liability for the company. A good analogy would be a CEO of a shipping company not knowing how to sail. They will know costs of the voyage, costs associated with the voyage, etc. but not the day to day of how a ship operates. And they don’t need to. If anyone has worked with a micromanager they’d appreciate this.

JamesBarney 7y ago
Sure but sometimes this lack of knowledge will cripple a company. I've had a VP(who had a role similar to the cto for the department) who picked what time series database we should use based on this technology being the best one from a business standpoint. Unfortunately the technology was so bad from a technical standpoint that every single project that used it had it's budget and timeline explode 4-6x. This seems like an exaggeration but it isn't. One literally wrote a working application in 6 months then was mandated to move to the new technology (basically rewriting the application) and they spent 2 years rewriting while still leverage a lot of the code they already wrote. And I feel like 100s of these decision are made everyday by executives who oversee but don't grok software.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- scottlocklin 7y ago
  Out of more than idle curiosity, what was the TSDB?
  - JamesBarney 7y ago
    I would say but it's a small proprietary one that only the company I was working for used. So mentioning it doesn't help any devs avoid a mistake and outs the project.
- shaklee3 7y ago
  My bet is opentsdb?

JamesBarney 7y ago

Sure but sometimes this lack of knowledge will cripple a company. I've had a VP(who had a role similar to the cto for the department) who picked what time series database we should use based on this technology being the best one from a business standpoint. Unfortunately the technology was so bad from a technical standpoint that every single project that used it had it's budget and timeline explode 4-6x. This seems like an exaggeration but it isn't. One literally wrote a working application in 6 months then was mandated to move to the new technology (basically rewriting the application) and they spent 2 years rewriting while still leverage a lot of the code they already wrote. And I feel like 100s of these decision are made everyday by executives who oversee but don't grok software.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
scottlocklin 7y ago
Out of more than idle curiosity, what was the TSDB?
- JamesBarney 7y ago
  I would say but it's a small proprietary one that only the company I was working for used. So mentioning it doesn't help any devs avoid a mistake and outs the project.
shaklee3 7y ago
My bet is opentsdb?