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Man, if I'm trying to decide which company to work for, and I see a blog post from its CTO crowing about regularly checking in code on Saturdays and Sundays, I'

Man, if I'm trying to decide which company to work for, and I see a blog post from its CTO crowing about regularly checking in code on Saturdays and Sundays, I'd start backing slowly away. And when I got to the bit that said "AI has made me three times as productive," I'd turn and run. Your job at the top is, more than anything else, pushing down a healthy culture. That includes things like setting an example of not working through the weekend. If you're doing it, your reports and their reports will feel the need to do it, too. Don't. And if you do anyway, certainly don't brag about it! And then listen to this insanity: > Our team had considered potentially having the customer build their own integration on top of our API in order to get around this requirement, and scoping it out properly would have required many meetings across product, legal, and engineering. I built and shipped a working version in a day. It wasn’t perfect, but it solved their immediate problem and preserved goodwill with the customer. That's something you're willing to share out loud? Your company's technical process (which you're fully in control of, Mr. CTO) is so cumbersome that it seriously hinders your ability to execute, but, being above that process, you personally choose to circumvent it, foregoing required legal or engineering reviews, and shipping it immediately to your critically important customer? If one of the engineers who worked under you did that, you'd probably have fired him.

ctxc 1y ago
Flabbergasted to say the least. Dude do your job. Fix the process. Don't set a bad example.
dilyevsky 1y ago
> That's something you're willing to share out loud? Your company's technical process (which you're fully in control of, Mr. CTO) is so cumbersome that it seriously hinders your ability to execute This is exactly what someone who can't be easily unseated should be doing at a company - demonstrate to middle management that the process they've constructed is whack and take away excuses for not delivering. CEO or someone else on the founding team should be doing that to sales, marketing, etc as well
- OccamsMirror 1y ago
  Cowboy development might fly in an early stage startup. But are you even really a CTO or are you just an overpaid mid-level developer?
  - CuriouslyC 1y ago
    Just this. CTO title doesn't even make sense until your org is large enough that engineering vision and strategy becomes decoupled from execution.
  - mytailorisrich 1y ago
    I think the answer is in the blog: "I currently manage no direct reports and ship a lot of code."
    - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
      That’s not a role that I’d normally associate with “Chief” anything (which, by definition, means direct reports). More like Principal Engineer, or Architect. In smaller companies, this is probably fairly normal, but you can’t maintain this, as the company grows. I had a similar path, in my career. I originally started as a regular engineer, in a two-person team, and eventually ended up managing a small team of up to ten engineers. Towards the end, I couldn’t write any code (for the company), at all. I still needed to code, but did so, for volunteer/open-source stuff. I think it made me a better technical leader (I had an employment contract without a clause that interfered with outside coding). I remember wanting to take an iOS training course, but the company wouldn’t support it, so I took vacation, and went on my own dime. I never regretted it, but it was discouraging.
      - raw_anon_1111 1y ago
        The happy medium that the CTO did at the company where I worked where I was the architect guiding the technical direction, he would do non production level experimental coding as research - integrations with third party APIs, see if an AWS service was suitable - to take some of the load off of me hand the code over to me and I cleaned it up and made it production ready and championed it to the rest of the teams. He still helped accelerate efforts, got his coding fix when he had time, wasn’t in the critical path of any work, and he made the entire org better.
jumploops 1y ago
> regularly checking in code on Saturdays and Sundays If you’re working on insurance SaaS, I agree. If you’re building hard tech, I’d disagree entirely.
- HotGarbage 1y ago
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  - _vqpz 1y ago
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    - HotGarbage 1y ago
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stuffn 1y ago
Frankly if you’re a CTO you aren’t incentivized by a salary. It makes sense in this case no different than you’d code on the weekends for your side hustle. It only doesn’t make sense when this jackass thinks the salaried engineer needs this “grit”. C-levels aren’t supposed to be “model employees”. The incentive structure is wildly weighted in their favor. Instead you should ask them to understand the difference, which is asking a lot of these sociopaths, but I digress.
- brabel 1y ago
  So in your view c-level are all sociopaths? Let me guess you are not c-level. Or maybe you are but you’re the exception to the rule.
  - immibis 1y ago
    Hasn't it been repeatedly shown that C-level positions select for sociopaths?
manquer 1y ago
I code as a founder/CTO on weekends, I don't expect weekend work done by anyone else and most people rarely check in if ever on weekends. The job profile of founder-CTO has not a lot of overlap with that of an individual contributor to be leading by example, the overlap is quite narrow even for senior engineering leadership. Until recently[3] leaders with prior coding skills were always discouraged from code contributions and focus on management exclusively, for all the reasons some of them you describe. -- I usually say that I am a part-time coder, not a professional one, and caution not to look at what I do as a benchmark or signal. Vast majority of the code I write are DevEx or QoL for internal teams[4], or refactor tech debt that no one has time to deal with. Even mid-stage startups may not be large enough to invest in dedicated teams for this type of work. Occasionally I have written such integrations like OP[1]. It is typically a PoC for a demo, never a production one to actual customers. It would be unfair (and failure prone) to expect anyone else to start supporting a production integration without the full tooling or documentation. -- I agree it is a fine-line and you can err on the wrong side of it. It is easy and tempting to start focusing on production code and lose focus of the core job, but so many decisions as a founder are like that. I am hardly the best or optimal founder-CTO. However the value of being close to the metal is important and worth some risk in early to mid stage startups. Perhaps there is also value in a CTO who understands what individual contributors are doing and is able to be more realistic about outcomes instead of being purely few layers above and not clued in. -- [1] Not skipping legal that seems ridiculous, even if I wanted to, I can't imagine any partner would agree to it. [3] Now I do encourage to try the new tools, it is not they contribute to production or be an IC, it is to get a sense of what is possible and what is not today. A lot of pipe-dreams are being sold in the industry, without hands on experience using the new tools ( which are rapidly evolving) managers can tend to overestimate or misunderstand what is doable. [4]This is the core of the CTO job, writing code is rarely the bottleneck for productivity that was true even before generative coding tools, it is everything around that which creates friction. If you can reduce it, even writing some code to do so, it shouldn't be a problem or a flag. - Edited for brevity(some).
- raw_anon_1111 1y ago
  If you want to work on the weekend - and occasionally I find myself doing so as a staff level IC consultant who does need to spend an inordinate amount of time mentoring, project management, suppprting sales, interviewing candidates, babysitting clients, etc… - don’t send messages on Slack or email outside of business hours. I schedule messages to go out Monday morning and I never mention I worked on the weekend. I don’t want to set the expectation that people should work outside of business hours or that I’m willing to.
xnx 1y ago
The "C" stands for "Cowboy"
sa-code 1y ago
> I don’t particularly enjoy building orgs and figuring out people stuff. Engineering management involves navigating interpersonal dynamics, performance reviews, and organizational design. These are crucial functions, but they’re not where my strengths lie. This bit got me. It's a direct quote from the linked post for those who haven't read it
- lqstuart 1y ago
  Hahaha I would have led with this honestly. I’m the chief legal officer but at the end of the day I’m just like bruh, chill, who gives a shit
- dbbk 1y ago
  Then why are you the CTO!! Dude just wants to be a staff engineer
  - Lio 1y ago
    Maybe. If he’s a technical founder though what other position would you hold?
    - senorrib 1y ago
      Staff engineer. Founders don’t necessarily need to hold CXO titles to work in the startups they founded.
      - SJMG 1y ago
        A few examples that spring to mind, Steve Wozniak and Mitchell Hashimoto
        doctorleff 1y ago
        I recall James Goodnight of SAS coding while being a CEO. As per https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2014/05/12/an-interview-with-the-godfather-of-data-analytics-sass-jim-goodnight/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2014/05/12/an-intervi..., he still programs from time to time but doesn't have a specific part in development. In looking at the articles to refresh my memory, it is clear he is one of the good CEO's
jaccola 1y ago
Regarding culture: Complete nonsense. The free market will tell him if he can do this or not. If he can get valid candidates pushing this culture and it’s legal, why shouldn’t he? You, anyone interviewing there or anyone working at their company presumably doesn’t have to work there. Most countries don’t have slavery for tech jobs! No doubt he will lose many candidates with this culture (you and I included) but maybe that’s a strategy? Maybe he still gets plenty of candidates that are good and the culture he wants.
mdrachuk 1y ago
> Your job at the top is, more than anything else, pushing down a healthy culture. The CTOs role leading the tech folk to support business goals, which culture a part of. The healthy part is a subjective thing.
cloudhead 1y ago
That’s the point — I and others would have the opposite reaction, it’s self selecting, so it’s doing its job. I didn’t even read the article because I thought “boring, nothing special about a CTO who codes, we all do.”
mritchie712 1y ago
he's also casually trashing their engineering team... "I built it in a day" is suggesting no one else could have. I personally don't think there's anything wrong with doing it (i.e. shipping a feature quickly that a customer needs), but writing a blog post about it is questionable.
- switz 1y ago
  No, he clearly points that anyone else would have to be taken off their existing work and would have to context-switch to the context he already has. That's not trashing his engineering team.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
swaits 1y ago
Don’t just back away slowly. Run for your life! Prediction: this is the part of the AI boom that goes bust.
Rover222 1y ago
What’s your gripe with the part about the AI productivity boost? For anyone working in fairly standard web dev tech, I’d say it’s more of a red flag if a boss denies the productivity boost of these tools (at least when used by senior devs)
dangoodmanUT 1y ago
It seems like you're confusing technical founder CTO at a startup with professional CTO at a large org. For the later, what you said makes some sense, and it definitely seems like you're more familiar with this archetype. For the former, the article appears correct. If you've not worked at an early stage startup before, the culture is _very_ different. As a side note: This article is doing it's job. People that are a good fit for the company will agree, and want to work with them. People that are not a good fit for the company will not agree, and naturally run the other way. Makes filtering out candidates easier.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- fogzen 1y ago
  Working at a startup can be rewarding, but it often means putting in founder-level effort while the founders capture most of the upside.
- paholg 1y ago
  At an early stage startup, shipping a feature should not require "many meetings across product, legal, and engineering". Especially not one that can be mostly built in a day.
- cantor_S_drug 1y ago
  Snake-style org vs Elephant-style org. Nature accomodates lot of survival strategies. People shouldn't unnecessarily criticize others.
singleshot_ 1y ago
Calling this guy a CTO is a stretch. He's a senior developer at a company with no CTO. If you wanted to work yourself into a CTO position, his shop might not be a terrible choice, although I would imagine it would be a bit rough at first.
varispeed 1y ago
I fondly remember times when at one company CTO was doing round the dev section at 4:50pm and saying everyone close their machines. Go home or to pub, it's an order. Once I sent an email at 5:45pm as I forgot to say something earlier about the project. I didn't get a response and in the morning got told off that I should never send an email outside of working hours, unless it is a personal matter that cannot wait. Couple of years later the owners exited and new management replaced everyone with workers from consultancy of theirs. Company no longer exists.
999900000999 1y ago
> During Thanksgiving break, I just decided to build it and knocked out a prototype. You don’t want a boss that works on Thanksgiving and thus probably expects you to as well ? I’d actually be ok with this if bro offered half a million total comp. I’ll deal with it for 5 years and then retire.
KaiserPro 1y ago
> An engineer unfamiliar with that part of the codebase would spend quite a lot of time figuring out those details. Your job is to delegate, yes, the first delegation is hard, but the engineer either grows, or doesn't (then you need to move or yeet). Yes I understand that you want to code all the time, then you're not a CTO. A CTO leads from the front, leads with process, and context. Your job is to provide context so that your team can execute.
yieldcrv 1y ago
> foregoing required legal depending on the legal requirement it may not have been foregoed but instead became legal because an executive did it
- sokoloff 1y ago
  I took that a step farther and got written into our SOX compliance processes explicit “deviate from normal processes as much as required when this short list of people declare an emergency”, shamelessly cribbed from aviation law. Slightly more details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39174707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39174707
sokoloff 1y ago
In that story, we don’t know why legal would need to be involved. Maybe it’s for a good and essential reason or maybe it’s for a sand-in-the-gears reason. Maybe the CTO’s company uses GPLv3 or AGPL software and the customer’s legal department vomits all over AGPL and demands extensive review for GPLv3 for their developers. Or maybe they’re worried about later finger-pointing and support issues. Or ensuring the company is running on unmodified, mainline sources. Those would all be reasons why the CTO’s company could ship without involving customer legal teams without it being a red flag to me.
whiplash451 1y ago
> I built and shipped a working version in a day. If I were an engineer working under a CTO doing this, I’d find it extremely demotivating. Why, as a CTO, are you not setting things up so that I can do it instead?
johnjwang 1y ago
(Author here): I hear what you’re saying, though I’ve never “crowed about regularly checking code in on Saturdays and Sundays” and I think that’s a false characterization of my article. Do I love to code? For sure. Is it something I do on the weekends? Generally yes because it’s something incredibly fun for me, and it gives me a lot of energy. Now, is it an expectation I have of my team? No, it’s not because I want a sustainable pace for the team and I recognize not everyone has the same relationship with work or coding as I do. And on the “circumventing process” bit — what I shared wasn’t an example of blowing past legal/security review recklessly. It was a case where I, as someone with full context, could quickly build something safe and unblock a customer, going through our normal code review and deploy process. I don’t expect anyone (myself included), to have any exceptions to this.
- ketamine 1y ago
  I'm guessing you are ~28, maybe married and no kids.
scrubs 1y ago
Agree. Let me say much the same through a parallel line of observation: maybe you dont need a this cto or any cto? Maybe you need to move this guy to sales. Goodness gracious corporate america. Can we PLEASE stop with hustle and bs? You ever heard buffet or munger say everyday they do some bill keeping in a double entry accounting system and AI makes them better? Never. Why? Because when you and your org are competent you're not constantly on the hussle. My guess if they need to, they do and as they have things on their mind they don't have time to blog about. People know what management at Berkshire Hathaway stands for. Case closed. Competent upper management can be a boon for orgs esp on cross functional management which builds the org and keeps ia from infighting and running in 10x different directions. This guy isn't that. Moreover that means other people on the board don't know that either.
- vincenthwt 1y ago
  Thank you for sharing this. The part about Warren Buffett and the contrast with hustle culture is particularly delightful. It highlights the importance of competence and meaningful leadership over performative busyness.
CyanLite2 1y ago
They brag about hiring on visas, so you can read between that post and the visa sponsorship as a 996 organization.

ctxc 1y ago

Flabbergasted to say the least. Dude do your job. Fix the process. Don't set a bad example.

dilyevsky 1y ago

> That's something you're willing to share out loud? Your company's technical process (which you're fully in control of, Mr. CTO) is so cumbersome that it seriously hinders your ability to execute This is exactly what someone who can't be easily unseated should be doing at a company - demonstrate to middle management that the process they've constructed is whack and take away excuses for not delivering. CEO or someone else on the founding team should be doing that to sales, marketing, etc as well

OccamsMirror 1y ago
Cowboy development might fly in an early stage startup. But are you even really a CTO or are you just an overpaid mid-level developer?
- CuriouslyC 1y ago
  Just this. CTO title doesn't even make sense until your org is large enough that engineering vision and strategy becomes decoupled from execution.
- mytailorisrich 1y ago
  I think the answer is in the blog: "I currently manage no direct reports and ship a lot of code."
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    That’s not a role that I’d normally associate with “Chief” anything (which, by definition, means direct reports). More like Principal Engineer, or Architect. In smaller companies, this is probably fairly normal, but you can’t maintain this, as the company grows. I had a similar path, in my career. I originally started as a regular engineer, in a two-person team, and eventually ended up managing a small team of up to ten engineers. Towards the end, I couldn’t write any code (for the company), at all. I still needed to code, but did so, for volunteer/open-source stuff. I think it made me a better technical leader (I had an employment contract without a clause that interfered with outside coding). I remember wanting to take an iOS training course, but the company wouldn’t support it, so I took vacation, and went on my own dime. I never regretted it, but it was discouraging.
    - raw_anon_1111 1y ago
      The happy medium that the CTO did at the company where I worked where I was the architect guiding the technical direction, he would do non production level experimental coding as research - integrations with third party APIs, see if an AWS service was suitable - to take some of the load off of me hand the code over to me and I cleaned it up and made it production ready and championed it to the rest of the teams. He still helped accelerate efforts, got his coding fix when he had time, wasn’t in the critical path of any work, and he made the entire org better.

jumploops 1y ago

> regularly checking in code on Saturdays and Sundays If you’re working on insurance SaaS, I agree. If you’re building hard tech, I’d disagree entirely.

HotGarbage 1y ago
[flagged]
- _vqpz 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - HotGarbage 1y ago
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stuffn 1y ago

Frankly if you’re a CTO you aren’t incentivized by a salary. It makes sense in this case no different than you’d code on the weekends for your side hustle. It only doesn’t make sense when this jackass thinks the salaried engineer needs this “grit”. C-levels aren’t supposed to be “model employees”. The incentive structure is wildly weighted in their favor. Instead you should ask them to understand the difference, which is asking a lot of these sociopaths, but I digress.

brabel 1y ago
So in your view c-level are all sociopaths? Let me guess you are not c-level. Or maybe you are but you’re the exception to the rule.
- immibis 1y ago
  Hasn't it been repeatedly shown that C-level positions select for sociopaths?

manquer 1y ago

I code as a founder/CTO on weekends, I don't expect weekend work done by anyone else and most people rarely check in if ever on weekends. The job profile of founder-CTO has not a lot of overlap with that of an individual contributor to be leading by example, the overlap is quite narrow even for senior engineering leadership. Until recently[3] leaders with prior coding skills were always discouraged from code contributions and focus on management exclusively, for all the reasons some of them you describe. -- I usually say that I am a part-time coder, not a professional one, and caution not to look at what I do as a benchmark or signal. Vast majority of the code I write are DevEx or QoL for internal teams[4], or refactor tech debt that no one has time to deal with. Even mid-stage startups may not be large enough to invest in dedicated teams for this type of work. Occasionally I have written such integrations like OP[1]. It is typically a PoC for a demo, never a production one to actual customers. It would be unfair (and failure prone) to expect anyone else to start supporting a production integration without the full tooling or documentation. -- I agree it is a fine-line and you can err on the wrong side of it. It is easy and tempting to start focusing on production code and lose focus of the core job, but so many decisions as a founder are like that. I am hardly the best or optimal founder-CTO. However the value of being close to the metal is important and worth some risk in early to mid stage startups. Perhaps there is also value in a CTO who understands what individual contributors are doing and is able to be more realistic about outcomes instead of being purely few layers above and not clued in. -- [1] Not skipping legal that seems ridiculous, even if I wanted to, I can't imagine any partner would agree to it. [3] Now I do encourage to try the new tools, it is not they contribute to production or be an IC, it is to get a sense of what is possible and what is not today. A lot of pipe-dreams are being sold in the industry, without hands on experience using the new tools ( which are rapidly evolving) managers can tend to overestimate or misunderstand what is doable. [4]This is the core of the CTO job, writing code is rarely the bottleneck for productivity that was true even before generative coding tools, it is everything around that which creates friction. If you can reduce it, even writing some code to do so, it shouldn't be a problem or a flag. - Edited for brevity(some).

raw_anon_1111 1y ago
If you want to work on the weekend - and occasionally I find myself doing so as a staff level IC consultant who does need to spend an inordinate amount of time mentoring, project management, suppprting sales, interviewing candidates, babysitting clients, etc… - don’t send messages on Slack or email outside of business hours. I schedule messages to go out Monday morning and I never mention I worked on the weekend. I don’t want to set the expectation that people should work outside of business hours or that I’m willing to.

xnx 1y ago

The "C" stands for "Cowboy"

sa-code 1y ago

> I don’t particularly enjoy building orgs and figuring out people stuff. Engineering management involves navigating interpersonal dynamics, performance reviews, and organizational design. These are crucial functions, but they’re not where my strengths lie. This bit got me. It's a direct quote from the linked post for those who haven't read it

lqstuart 1y ago
Hahaha I would have led with this honestly. I’m the chief legal officer but at the end of the day I’m just like bruh, chill, who gives a shit
dbbk 1y ago
Then why are you the CTO!! Dude just wants to be a staff engineer
- Lio 1y ago
  Maybe. If he’s a technical founder though what other position would you hold?
  - senorrib 1y ago
    Staff engineer. Founders don’t necessarily need to hold CXO titles to work in the startups they founded.
    - SJMG 1y ago
      A few examples that spring to mind, Steve Wozniak and Mitchell Hashimoto
      - doctorleff 1y ago
        I recall James Goodnight of SAS coding while being a CEO. As per https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2014/05/12/an-interview-with-the-godfather-of-data-analytics-sass-jim-goodnight/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2014/05/12/an-intervi..., he still programs from time to time but doesn't have a specific part in development. In looking at the articles to refresh my memory, it is clear he is one of the good CEO's

jaccola 1y ago

Regarding culture: Complete nonsense. The free market will tell him if he can do this or not. If he can get valid candidates pushing this culture and it’s legal, why shouldn’t he? You, anyone interviewing there or anyone working at their company presumably doesn’t have to work there. Most countries don’t have slavery for tech jobs! No doubt he will lose many candidates with this culture (you and I included) but maybe that’s a strategy? Maybe he still gets plenty of candidates that are good and the culture he wants.

mdrachuk 1y ago

> Your job at the top is, more than anything else, pushing down a healthy culture. The CTOs role leading the tech folk to support business goals, which culture a part of. The healthy part is a subjective thing.

cloudhead 1y ago

That’s the point — I and others would have the opposite reaction, it’s self selecting, so it’s doing its job. I didn’t even read the article because I thought “boring, nothing special about a CTO who codes, we all do.”

mritchie712 1y ago

he's also casually trashing their engineering team... "I built it in a day" is suggesting no one else could have. I personally don't think there's anything wrong with doing it (i.e. shipping a feature quickly that a customer needs), but writing a blog post about it is questionable.

switz 1y ago
No, he clearly points that anyone else would have to be taken off their existing work and would have to context-switch to the context he already has. That's not trashing his engineering team.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

swaits 1y ago

Don’t just back away slowly. Run for your life! Prediction: this is the part of the AI boom that goes bust.

Rover222 1y ago

What’s your gripe with the part about the AI productivity boost? For anyone working in fairly standard web dev tech, I’d say it’s more of a red flag if a boss denies the productivity boost of these tools (at least when used by senior devs)

dangoodmanUT 1y ago

It seems like you're confusing technical founder CTO at a startup with professional CTO at a large org. For the later, what you said makes some sense, and it definitely seems like you're more familiar with this archetype. For the former, the article appears correct. If you've not worked at an early stage startup before, the culture is _very_ different. As a side note: This article is doing it's job. People that are a good fit for the company will agree, and want to work with them. People that are not a good fit for the company will not agree, and naturally run the other way. Makes filtering out candidates easier.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
fogzen 1y ago
Working at a startup can be rewarding, but it often means putting in founder-level effort while the founders capture most of the upside.
paholg 1y ago
At an early stage startup, shipping a feature should not require "many meetings across product, legal, and engineering". Especially not one that can be mostly built in a day.
cantor_S_drug 1y ago
Snake-style org vs Elephant-style org. Nature accomodates lot of survival strategies. People shouldn't unnecessarily criticize others.

singleshot_ 1y ago

Calling this guy a CTO is a stretch. He's a senior developer at a company with no CTO. If you wanted to work yourself into a CTO position, his shop might not be a terrible choice, although I would imagine it would be a bit rough at first.

varispeed 1y ago

I fondly remember times when at one company CTO was doing round the dev section at 4:50pm and saying everyone close their machines. Go home or to pub, it's an order. Once I sent an email at 5:45pm as I forgot to say something earlier about the project. I didn't get a response and in the morning got told off that I should never send an email outside of working hours, unless it is a personal matter that cannot wait. Couple of years later the owners exited and new management replaced everyone with workers from consultancy of theirs. Company no longer exists.

999900000999 1y ago

> During Thanksgiving break, I just decided to build it and knocked out a prototype. You don’t want a boss that works on Thanksgiving and thus probably expects you to as well ? I’d actually be ok with this if bro offered half a million total comp. I’ll deal with it for 5 years and then retire.

KaiserPro 1y ago

> An engineer unfamiliar with that part of the codebase would spend quite a lot of time figuring out those details. Your job is to delegate, yes, the first delegation is hard, but the engineer either grows, or doesn't (then you need to move or yeet). Yes I understand that you want to code all the time, then you're not a CTO. A CTO leads from the front, leads with process, and context. Your job is to provide context so that your team can execute.

yieldcrv 1y ago

> foregoing required legal depending on the legal requirement it may not have been foregoed but instead became legal because an executive did it

sokoloff 1y ago
I took that a step farther and got written into our SOX compliance processes explicit “deviate from normal processes as much as required when this short list of people declare an emergency”, shamelessly cribbed from aviation law. Slightly more details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39174707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39174707

sokoloff 1y ago

In that story, we don’t know why legal would need to be involved. Maybe it’s for a good and essential reason or maybe it’s for a sand-in-the-gears reason. Maybe the CTO’s company uses GPLv3 or AGPL software and the customer’s legal department vomits all over AGPL and demands extensive review for GPLv3 for their developers. Or maybe they’re worried about later finger-pointing and support issues. Or ensuring the company is running on unmodified, mainline sources. Those would all be reasons why the CTO’s company could ship without involving customer legal teams without it being a red flag to me.

whiplash451 1y ago

> I built and shipped a working version in a day. If I were an engineer working under a CTO doing this, I’d find it extremely demotivating. Why, as a CTO, are you not setting things up so that I can do it instead?

johnjwang 1y ago

(Author here): I hear what you’re saying, though I’ve never “crowed about regularly checking code in on Saturdays and Sundays” and I think that’s a false characterization of my article. Do I love to code? For sure. Is it something I do on the weekends? Generally yes because it’s something incredibly fun for me, and it gives me a lot of energy. Now, is it an expectation I have of my team? No, it’s not because I want a sustainable pace for the team and I recognize not everyone has the same relationship with work or coding as I do. And on the “circumventing process” bit — what I shared wasn’t an example of blowing past legal/security review recklessly. It was a case where I, as someone with full context, could quickly build something safe and unblock a customer, going through our normal code review and deploy process. I don’t expect anyone (myself included), to have any exceptions to this.

ketamine 1y ago
I'm guessing you are ~28, maybe married and no kids.

scrubs 1y ago

Agree. Let me say much the same through a parallel line of observation: maybe you dont need a this cto or any cto? Maybe you need to move this guy to sales. Goodness gracious corporate america. Can we PLEASE stop with hustle and bs? You ever heard buffet or munger say everyday they do some bill keeping in a double entry accounting system and AI makes them better? Never. Why? Because when you and your org are competent you're not constantly on the hussle. My guess if they need to, they do and as they have things on their mind they don't have time to blog about. People know what management at Berkshire Hathaway stands for. Case closed. Competent upper management can be a boon for orgs esp on cross functional management which builds the org and keeps ia from infighting and running in 10x different directions. This guy isn't that. Moreover that means other people on the board don't know that either.

vincenthwt 1y ago
Thank you for sharing this. The part about Warren Buffett and the contrast with hustle culture is particularly delightful. It highlights the importance of competence and meaningful leadership over performative busyness.

CyanLite2 1y ago

They brag about hiring on visas, so you can read between that post and the visa sponsorship as a 996 organization.