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Interesting background - any story behind leaving IBM 18 years ago at the young age of ~33?

As an aside, ultimate responsibility for IBM's corporate websites does not _sound_ very similar to the CTO role at a tech company.




I was burned out after 5 years of 7x24x365. Days were filled with conference calls and escalations about conference calls, nights were filled with the technical work I was supposed to be doing during the day. I was prohibited from filing patents due to some sort of corporate reporting arcanity, which derailed my technical career. I had (and apparently still have) an extremely negative reputation in the executive ranks from all of the times I told people that no, they couldn't run an IBM site under their desk, and many others.

Appreciate that it's not similar to today's concept of CTO. I was not only responsible for all IBM web sites, I was expected to design, develop, deploy, manage, diagnose software for all IBM web sites, even those that I had no direct control over. IBM’s own software products tended to trail what we were doing in production by 12-24 months, when they were actually released.

It was a fun job, until it wasn't.


Hence a classic toxic 24/7 role where you're expected to double as operation and developer and database and architect and all. You should have run away much quicker.

Nothing to do whatsoever with CTO. It's not event relevant to anything executive or management.

I hope that you can describe your position in a more positive light than this text and without alluding to being CTO, because both will get you rejected fairly quickly in any interview.


> 7x24x365

7x24x52 or 24x365

;^)


The phrase is colloquial not technical and is meant to represent nights(24) weekends(7) and holidays(365).


But it was funny and well placed snark :)




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