
Ask HN: Have you known any devs that become great CTOs with no leadership exp? - volkk
Have you known any devs that became CTO at early stage startup and grew to be REALLY good at their roles?<p>I feel like it&#x27;s a trend for young inexperienced first dev hires to become CTO as a cool title, and eventually get ousted for a really experienced one once the company got big enough.<p>Curious to know how to effectively grow as one and really become amazing at the job
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ramtatatam
Until the point the company you work for makes millions or hires more than
1000 CTO is just hype title (of course some CTO's will argue). It's business
role, not tech role. If you think CTO is tech then you are thinking tech
leader, not CTO... I have had the privilege to see real CTO at work, he was
leading organisation of 100000 tech employees. From the perspective of time I
can tell you that at the time I did not understand a thing of what he was
doing and in my lack of humbleness I thought I knew better.

As business role you need business skills, but above all experience and
connections. You won't learn how to deal with people or make good connections
by writing lines of code, you have to manage people to acquire this skill. And
on this level you have to deal with politics and I believe this is even more
difficult to get right...

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username90
Sounds like you are talking about how to get and keep a CTO position and not
how to do well in it. I'd argue that the most important role for a CTO is to
shape the engineering culture.

A famous example is Jeff Bezos mandating that teams expose their interfaces
via externalizable API's, he was a CEO but this was definitely a CTO move. He
wouldn't have been able to make this mandate if he wasn't a good engineer
himself, and that mandate lead to AWS which is where most of their current
profits comes from.

I think this is why founders are so important and why big corporations will
never be able to compete with startups, people who are better at solving
problems than playing politics will simply be unable to climb the corporate
hierarchies so they will only lead companies as founders.

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ramtatatam
'Sounds like you are talking about how to get and keep a CTO'

I'm not sure where did you get that conclusion from, care to elaborate?

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davismwfl
Yes, you can do it, the key is recognizing your weaknesses and that at some
point you will cease to primarily be an active engineer (meaning you won't
code day to day etc). Great CTO's always remain very technical IMO, but they
have to develop a whole new set of skills. Most of the time you will find it
is hard to scale yourself fast enough if you are on a rocket ship, so the key
way to remain CTO is to hire for your gaps beyond just engineers, hire product
people, hire project managers, hire an ex-CTO that wants to mentor and play a
role less than the CTO.

I have been a founder prior and I have been a CTO for different companies as
well as a Chief Software Architect at GE (essentially a large project's CTO
where my staff was over 130 people). Being CTO is hard to do well, and
depending on the organization it can be downright the most stressful job. It
also can be the most rewarding and fun job, so I definitely love it.

Some things I recommend (you probably already have some just listing things
that pop into my mind) and this is by no means comprehensive:

1\. Always make yourself redundant in all the positions you move through on
the way to CTO (that's how you will be one).

2\. Find a good mentor who can help you and will be painfully honest with you.
Find this person hopefully before you are the CTO, that way they can help
guide you on the way up.

3\. Learn to take feedback across the board. Don't ignore the mentors advice
and be careful not to ask 10 people for advice as at some point it becomes
noise and you won't make a good decision.

4\. Learn to make decisions with less than the full picture, and live with the
consequences. And accept you need to change the decision or reverse course and
that's ok, don't live with a bad decision when the facts show you made a
mistake, correct and move forward.

5\. Say no often. Learn that the business goals/needs comes first, not fun
cool new technology. Of course, if the business is to develop fun new tech
that's cool too.

6\. Learn how to work with all types of people, this can be hard but it is
absolutely required because you need diversity and you need to hire different
skillsets other than just engineers as a CTO.

7\. Learn to speak business, this is a fun challenge if you don't know already
and it is immensely helpful.

8\. Learn basic accounting so you understand why things are being asked of you
sometimes. This also makes you far more valuable to the organization and in
the future.

9\. Learn to scale the organization, this is trial and error to some degree if
you've never done it before. Hiring and team structure can be hard,
experimenting and taking team feedback is how you succeed.

10\. Respect your weaknesses and find people to compliment them. We all have
weaknesses, respect you have them, acknowledge them and hire people to balance
you.

11\. Hire people that disagree with you. I don't mean hire assholes, but hire
people who challenge your way of thinking, that force you to make better
decisions.

12\. Learn how to manage products, read some books on new product
introductions, processes and find a product mentor. Product is what is
important, not whether you used framework A or B, but you need to balance all
that, so understanding product is critical to success.

FYI: I am the CTO of a backed healthcare startup.

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jaredsohn
> Respect your weaknesses and find people to compliment them

Your spelling skills are amazing. :)

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davismwfl
That's awesome. I screwed that one up, my bad. :) Complement vs compliment,
just a slight difference.

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raveenb
Politics first, business next and then tech, and in that order is what you
need to master. I have experienced it first hand, I was not ready for the
first skill fully, takes a while for techies to warm up to it.

