
Ask HN: Is it expected of a new CTO to redefine the development stack? - zeeone
The company hired a new CTO. He&#x27;s taken it upon himself to set the development stack for both back and front end development. Our application is migrating to micro services. Is it normal for a CTO to set a single technology to be used in all services?
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KingOfCoders
Rewrites are dangerous for companies. They cost time and their benefit is
small at best, often they leave the system in a worse state, see "Things You
Should Never Do, Part I" [1]. As a CEO I would be very suspicious if a CTO
rewrites the stack.

That said I did come into companies as CTO where I should have started a
rewrite. The code plainly was not able to scale the way it was written. We had
lots of trouble with scaling and I struggled balacing feature pressure and
technical rewrites of parts of the code base in order to scale. Getting in and
start with rewriting the code base for 6 months so it would scale would have
made things much easier for all developers.

As a CTO coach this is also what I tell my coachees now :-)

[1] [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-
should-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-
do-part-i/)

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__d
It depends.

A CTO is responsible for ensuring that the company is able to deliver what’s
needed, and if the current stack has issues, including ok-now-but-won’t-scale
issues, then they should switch it out for one that positions the company for
success.

OTOH, it could be motivated by a range of unjustifiable things: personal
familiarity, resume building, blind trend following, asserting of authority,
etc.

In most cases, the engineering staff can tell whether the motivation is good
or not.

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exolymph
It's an example of a larger pattern, which is that new execs like to shake
things up. There are charitable and uncharitable explanations of why, but
really it varies by individual.

