
What CTOs Fear Most - nathantross
https://keen.io/blog/63582764323/what-ctos-fear-most
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mwetzler
Can someone help me understand what is going on with the mods or the ranking
algorithm here? This post was on the front page this morning, dropped from #19
to #50 within in one minute.

Then it reappeared on the front page for a good two hours, now mysteriously
dropped from #9 to #50 within one minute.

It's like there is a bot or mod that is flagging it down to #50. I'm beginning
to suspect I'm cursed or someone has it out for posts from this domain! Kind
of disappointing since I worked really hard on this piece. I've read how the
ranking algorithm works but I don't have a voting ring and there is no flame
war happening here. Sad face.

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bowlofpetunias
Great series. One thing I'm missing though, but it could just be me, is that
being the CTO in my experience is often a _lonely_ job.

Everyone else is focused on either business or tech. You're usually the only
one that sees both. There's nobody to spar with on the whole picture, you have
to make decisions with far reaching consequences on your own.

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arohner
That's definitely not true where I am. Probably half our devs care about the
business side. My co-founder and I are both techies who care about business,
so we spar often.

On the far reaching consequences side, I didn't realize how important the
choices we made in the first month were. Some of those are still with us.

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jjoe
I'm confused that none of them expressed fear of being the target of a serious
DDoS attack. Is it regarded as such a black swan event that it's not even in
the radar?

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arohner
That's one of those 'good problems'.

step 1) worry about how to get big enough that people even know who you are,
and think that DDoSing is worth their time

step 2) worry about how to deal with the DDoS

completing step 1 is much, much harder :-)

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briancary
Great insights here. I think there is a common pattern - one that I've
experienced as well. Growing a new piece of technology with no customers to an
evolved product that scales and has a growing engineering team behind it
introduces lots of new issues that have to be dealt with. I'm not necessarily
a process freak, but from my experience, having a few solid processes really
goes a long way and should be put in place early. Especially revolving around
communication of issues and development priorities. When there's a major fire
or conflict on teams, there's a big microscope that should be looked through
in order to add improvements that will help a company get past future stages
of growth more smoothly.

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rhizome
That pattern is called the Red Queen Syndrome and can be paraphrased thus:
solving problems uncovers other problems.

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goshx
Great series! This is my first year as a CTO and I can relate to most of their
stories already. It is hard to move away from your comfortable technical zone
and have to start to worry more about the non-tech side of the business. A big
challenge are the soft skills... once you become CTO you have to deal with a
lot more people than with computers. The technical side is a huge challenge as
well, but these are fun issues to deal with, although some do keep me awake at
night :)

I'm learning a lot reading these interviews, so a big THANKS to the author!

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nephorider
Nice interviews. I really enjoyed reading the answer of Alex Haro to the last
2 days worries. It definitely conveys the fact that technical issues are one
component of the job, the others being often more human-related. Software
engineers often their have strong opinions (and usually for the best) and
making all work together, without going in a techie fight, can sometimes be a
real juggling act.

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amduser29
Alex Haro (CTO / Life360) here. Very excited to be a part of this series.
Happy to help any way I can. alex@life360.com

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chiph
Do you have a list of technologies/projects that are your "Yes, we want that,
but not right now." list? How do you decide when to flip their do-it-now bit?

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tobylane
In people's experience, how big does a non-tech company have to be before you
can expect the CTO to be really wrong or behind with current practises,
hardware and so on?

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AznHisoka
Great interview. Now can we get an interview series with founders/business
owners and ask them what business problems/pains they wish someone could solve
for them? :)

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justinelof
Ton's of great content in this series. Really interesting to hear how much
CTO's think about company culture.

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akurilin
Really liking this series, a great read. Would love it if you guys made more
of them.

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mwetzler
Thank you!! It's a slow process, but I'd love to make more. Some ideas I have
are: Stories of massive growth/scale, Stories of horrific bugs/failures,
Stories of mistakes/regrets, Stories of introspection (realizing something
about yourself that changes the way you approach work). I'm particularly
interested in stories of conflicts and mistakes -- I feel like people don't
share them enough and they can be really fascinating, valuable, and relatable.

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jnazario
fantastic, really like this series that shows people going beyond the early "i
have a technology insight that'll work well" to leading the business.

thank you.

