

10 steps to finding your CTO, guaranteed - joshwprinceton
http://joshrweinstein.com/post/28350379537

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rdegges
So, this is a pretty decent advice. Basically, the author's idea is that if
you:

\- Treat finding a CTO like a full-time job,

\- Learn to build some basic HTML,

\- Read a book on Ruby / Git / Rails,

You should be able to find a _good_ CTO for your company.

Unfortunately, while this is some pretty good starter advice, I doubt this
would help you find a _great_ CTO, first engineer, whatever.

Smart people typically want to be around other smart people, and the idea that
building a simple HTML page and reading through a single book will let you
find an amazing programmer to really build your product is, unfortunately, not
realistic.

Great programmers look for:

\- Interesting technical challenges,

\- To be treated as equals, and have a large amount of influence over
technologies, product decisions, etc.,

\- Highly motivated, smart people they can learn from,

\- Great compensation,

\- A very strong sense of purpose and direction.

If you're a business person who can offer all of the above, you'll probably
have a great chance of finding a really awesome tech person to work with.

Unless you plan on really getting great with HTML or something of the sort,
it's probably a better idea to instead learn to use a tool like balsamiq
(<http://www.balsamiq.com/>) and make some really amazing wireframes instead.
At least doing things this way, you'll have a really clean skeleton to show
off to people, and help them understand your vision.

If you're looking for a programmer out there--best of luck!

