4 ms·

Curious to know where the statement "real life is not fair" is coming from / what it's referring to.

by warent 4y ago

citizenpaul 4y ago
> do you want an opaque company where politics drive individual success >you want a transparent company where employees respect their leaders and where the best insight wins? The comment I replied to has very startup company silicon valley skew to it naive of the majority of the world. Very few of us are in any position to determine or change the political/cultural/driving forces of a company we have to work at. Usually the best you can do is adapt to whatever is already there and try to make the best of it. CTO is not a powerful position at most companies.
- jcheng 4y ago
  What part of the world are you from?
  - citizenpaul 4y ago
    USA East coast.
    - random314 4y ago
      Which company do you work for? I am making a list of companies to avoid.
- kelnos 4y ago
  > CTO is not a powerful position at most companies. This I do agree with. Many CTOs don't actually have the entire engineering organization under them in the reporting chain (at a reasonably-mature company; not talking about a startup where the CTO is often one of the co-founders and runs engineering), so they have no real power to get other people to do what they think should be done. At best they have an "Office of the CTO", or perhaps run the company's software architecture group (if the company even has one), and then they just have a tiny army of people who try their hardest to convince other teams to do things that aren't in their roadmap and would mean pissing off their bosses if they took them on. Not fun!
- mianos 4y ago
  Yet in some companies, the CTO has the ear of the top executives. If some scheming non-technical career climber can get their way into the CTO's position, they can get to the top of the tree. A lot can be achieved by aligning themselves with successful projects and crapping on others at the start or just at the cusp point of success or failure.

Curious to know where the statement "real life is not fair" is coming from / what it's referring to.

by warent 4y ago

Curious to know where the statement "real life is not fair" is coming from / what it's referring to.

> do you want an opaque company where politics drive individual success >you want a transparent company where employees respect their leaders and where the best insight wins? The comment I replied to has very startup company silicon valley skew to it naive of the majority of the world. Very few of us are in any position to determine or change the political/cultural/driving forces of a company we have to work at. Usually the best you can do is adapt to whatever is already there and try to make the best of it. CTO is not a powerful position at most companies.

jcheng 4y ago
What part of the world are you from?
- citizenpaul 4y ago
  USA East coast.
  - random314 4y ago
    Which company do you work for? I am making a list of companies to avoid.
kelnos 4y ago
> CTO is not a powerful position at most companies. This I do agree with. Many CTOs don't actually have the entire engineering organization under them in the reporting chain (at a reasonably-mature company; not talking about a startup where the CTO is often one of the co-founders and runs engineering), so they have no real power to get other people to do what they think should be done. At best they have an "Office of the CTO", or perhaps run the company's software architecture group (if the company even has one), and then they just have a tiny army of people who try their hardest to convince other teams to do things that aren't in their roadmap and would mean pissing off their bosses if they took them on. Not fun!
mianos 4y ago
Yet in some companies, the CTO has the ear of the top executives. If some scheming non-technical career climber can get their way into the CTO's position, they can get to the top of the tree. A lot can be achieved by aligning themselves with successful projects and crapping on others at the start or just at the cusp point of success or failure.