I just had an interesting experience interacting with a CTO who writes a blog. (If he is okay with it, I'll post his name later.) I was between jobs, and I ask

I just had an interesting experience interacting with a CTO who writes a blog. (If he is okay with it, I'll post his name later.) I was between jobs, and I asked myself, "Where do I want to take my career next?" and I decided that I wanted to move in the direction of Big Data and Analytics. I already knew of an analytics company that was doing cutting edge stuff with Kafka and Storm, so I sent the CTO an email (I had briefly met him once before at a Meetup). He said "Yes, let's talk" and we scheduled a talk for 1 week in the future. I had that week mostly free, so I decided to spend that time studying the company. And I was amazed and how much I could learn about the company, because this is pretty much the first company I have ever applied at where the CTO writes long, thoughtful posts on his personal blog. I have worked at WineSpectator.com and Timeout.com and ShermansTravel.com, and even though all of those are publishing firms, none of them have any public information about their technology (this is changing, slightly, in the case of Timeout.com). With each of those companies, I basically went in blind, with no idea of what they were doing. In contrast, the analytics company was transparent: they had released some important software to Github, so I was able to review the code, and read the issues that other developers had raised. They had also started a mailist on Google Groups, so I was able to read over dozens of public conversations regarding the strengths and weaknesses of their technology. And the CTO posts 2 or 3 posts each month, to his personal blog, most of the posts being long and in-depth. I read everything he had written during the last year, and so I was able to get a good sense of why he had made the decisions that he had made (why use Kafka and Storm) and where he'd like to evolve the company's technology stack. Because of all that, I felt like we were able to have a high-quality conversation (via both Skype and email). I didn't need to ask stupid beginner questions like "So, uh, what do you guys do?" The argument against blogging is similar to the (now largely discredited) argument that used to be made against open-sourcing one's own technology: if you give away the company's secrets, then your company has no unique advantages. I can recall, during the 1990s, people would look at you like you were crazy if you suggested you were going to give away part of your technology. But over the last 20 years, the whole tech industry has become much more comfortable with the idea of open-sourcing some of a company's technology. Having a public blog is a bit like having a public open-source project: it raises your exposure, and perhaps even facilitates the process whereby others can help you. And the limits of both strategies are the same: I think it is rare for a company to open-source 100% of its technology, and I think it would be rare for a CTO or CEO to share 100% of their thinking on a blog. But sharing part of the technology, or part of one's thinking, can clearly have benefits.