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I am a CTO, and have been for 20 years. 20 years ago I was co-founding a company, so that kind of CTO was very different than the CTO I am today. Starting a c
by sponaugle 4y ago
I am a CTO, and have been for 20 years. 20 years ago I was co-founding a company, so that kind of CTO was very different than the CTO I am today. Starting a company meant I was the technical part of the company. Raising money, talking to VCs, customers, hiring, and all of the other usual growth stuff. Of course I developed code, architectures, plans, deployments. I deployed, installed network switching gear, configured BGP peering, and debugged database problems. As the company grew, the role changed.
I'm now CTO of the larger company that acquired me and the role is different in almost every way. The role is to lead a path to technology changes, but much of that is technology coming from the technology staff itself. The most valuable learning happens by listening to my team and the teams around us. There is as much business as there is technology, as much future guessing as there is past evaluation.
Through all of these changes, day 1 to today, the most important skill has been a desire to be technical. I still write code for my own projects, develop my own projects, design microprocessors, hardware, software, sensors, and everything in between. If someone asks me a question, I want to understand how to get to the answer, not just get the answer.
Of course I have to understand the fundamentals of the business, and of business. Of course I have to convince non technical people why we need to do things. None of that is easier done by being non-technical, and much of it is done wrong by being non-technical. Stay frosty.
(Funny side note.. in the beginning, I often said during a 'introduce yourself' part of a meeting "I'm Jeff, the Chief Technical Officer" by mistake. )
- kragen 4y agoYou've been designing microprocessors for 20 years? By yourself, or do you mean that you're contributing to your team's microprocessor design? Were you sending out your own processor designs to MOSIS or CMP or something 20 years ago, or was this more an FPGA thing?
- sponaugle 4y agoOh no.. the microprocessor stuff is purely a technical hobby, although it was what I specialized in undergrad EE, and I worked at Intel for 3 years right out of college. I have done FPGA designs, simulated designs in HDLs, and even a few really cool 74X digital logic based designs and implementations... and so many on paper experiments during occasional long boring meetings. The interesting aspect of doing microprocessor designs is the journey from the ISA concept through the implementation, discovering along the way all of the fantastic mistakes you have made. It really makes a better software engineer out of me. Doing deeply technical hobbies has improved my view and skill in so many areas, as well as helped me understand areas that I really suck at... which there are plenty!
- kragen 4y agoNice! What approaches to microprocessor design do you think are underexplored? What surprising mistakes have you made? What design possibilities are just starting to open up? What do you think of Alan Kay's claim that modern microprocessors are unnecessarily slow at running late-bound languages like Smalltalk because they're optimized for C?
- kragen 4y agoI guess I should clarify that I've been looking at weird things like Chuck Moore's Forth chip designs, the Smalltalk-80 virtual machine, the HP 9100A, the Burroughs 5500, and SeRV, but although I've implemented a virtual machine or two in C and carried some design sketches down to the gate level, I haven't run them on an FPGA or a breadboard yet.
- metadat 4y ago^ for context, sponaugle is CTO of Surescripts, LLC; a 500 employee SMB. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/surescripts https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/surescripts
- walrus01 4y ago^ for context, Jeff S also has a vast array of technical hobbies whether it's restoring early 1980s microcomputers, tearing a subaru WRX down to its smallest discrete pieces and rebuilding the entire drivetrain, or designing his own home solar power system... He's basically a modern polymath of nerd like pursuits. Jeff is the CTO version of the guy who wants and needs to "Get his hands dirty" in the cutting edge of whatever technical discipline he's engaged in, for the purpose of keeping himself mentally sharp and fully aware of the subject matter at hand. Even if he buys subaru engine parts from a specialist he puts a lot of time/research into thoroughly understanding what he's putting together. He's kind of locally well known in the pacific NW nerd community for these things.
- sponaugle 4y agoIndeed, having a somewhat unique name allows quick identification. We are probably a bit closer to 700 people now, and in the 20-30 billion transactions/yr, so very data and critical infrastructure heavy... which in itself has been very much a learning experience.
- personjerry 4y agoWhy was it a mistake to introduce yourself as such?
- sponaugle 4y agoA play on the words.. my title was Chief Technology Officer, not Chief Technical Officer.... which in the context of this post is perhaps telling!
- lisper 4y agoSorry, I'm still confused. Is there a salient difference between Chief Technical Officer and Chief Technology Officer? I've always used and heard these as synonyms.
- sponaugle 4y agoI think many people would consider either to be a good term to use.. but in the context of this article that we are commenting on (about CTO being technical), the slip is an indication of my predication to CTOs being technical.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sankumsek 4y agoUsually CTO == Chief Technology Officer, not Chief Technical Officer. But an amusing slip of the tongue that kinda works out! :)
- dheera 4y agoAlso, learning to dodge coffee chats so you have time to actually study and keep up with the times in tech.