
Ask HN: What would you ask a Chief Technology Officer? - andrewstuart
I&#x27;m podcast interviewing CTOs who have responsibility for software development, and I&#x27;m formulating questions.<p>What would you be interested to hear from a CTO in a podcast interview?
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weekay
1\. How do they keep on top of their technical debt ? 2\. How do their peers
especially CFO's perceive technology investments and processes ? 3\. How they
see their roles differentiating from CIO's ? 4\. Their approach to build Vs
buy 5\. How do they keep abreast of Innovation and what do they invest in
themselves staying upskilled ? 6\. How often do they peer review the code or
spend time with developers ? 7\. What keeps them awake at night ? 8\. Views
and adoption of open source 9\. What makes a good CTO in their opinion. 10\.
How are they approaching diversity and inclusion 11\. How do they see the role
of CTO changing in a few years ? 12\. Do they genuinely believe they have a
seat at the table ( at the board level )

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mtmail
"Ever had to let a person go? How did you handle the situation? Looking back
how would you handle it now?"

"Which tools do you use for capacity planning and forecasting?"

"What's your approach to document the whole system? (bird's-eye view)"

"Do you see office IT (printers, wifi, broken mouse) as part of your job? Why,
why not?"

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DrScump
Do they have a mechanism for product/service customer feedback to actually
_get to_ decisionmakers?

Daily, I see site issues, logic fails, missing features in apps and sites, but
there is generally no mechanism for sharing my genius insights.

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cimmanom
CTOs of companies of what size and what level of maturity? I'd ask very
different questions of a CTO of a 5-person startup than the CTO of a 50-year-
old multinational that employs tens of thousands.

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muzani
What's the most important skill for a CTO, or the most difficult skill to
learn? Infra? Managing? Product?

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taprun
How come CTOs are "chief" technology officers, but no one else is referred to
as a technology officer?

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dragonwriter
Isn't that true of most CxOs? I've always read CxO as “the corporate officer
who is the chief of x” (well, with a special case for CEOs who are the chief
of everything rather than the chief of executive.)

