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Until the point the company you work for makes millions or hires more than 1000 CTO is just hype title (of course some CTO's will argue). It's business role, no
by ramtatatam 7y ago
Until the point the company you work for makes millions or hires more than 1000 CTO is just hype title (of course some CTO's will argue). It's business role, not tech role. If you think CTO is tech then you are thinking tech leader, not CTO... I have had the privilege to see real CTO at work, he was leading organisation of 100000 tech employees. From the perspective of time I can tell you that at the time I did not understand a thing of what he was doing and in my lack of humbleness I thought I knew better.
As business role you need business skills, but above all experience and connections. You won't learn how to deal with people or make good connections by writing lines of code, you have to manage people to acquire this skill. And on this level you have to deal with politics and I believe this is even more difficult to get right...
- username90 7y agoSounds like you are talking about how to get and keep a CTO position and not how to do well in it. I'd argue that the most important role for a CTO is to shape the engineering culture. A famous example is Jeff Bezos mandating that teams expose their interfaces via externalizable API's, he was a CEO but this was definitely a CTO move. He wouldn't have been able to make this mandate if he wasn't a good engineer himself, and that mandate lead to AWS which is where most of their current profits comes from. I think this is why founders are so important and why big corporations will never be able to compete with startups, people who are better at solving problems than playing politics will simply be unable to climb the corporate hierarchies so they will only lead companies as founders.
- ramtatatam 7y ago'Sounds like you are talking about how to get and keep a CTO' I'm not sure where did you get that conclusion from, care to elaborate?