I'd be fired if I caused enough loss in revenue to pay my own salary for a year.
I am responsible for my choices. I'm CTO, I don't doubt that in some cases execs cover for each other, but at least I have anecdotal experience of what it would take for me to be fired- and this is clearly communicated to me.
Hope you get paid a lot! Otherwise you are either in a very young or very stupid job.
I regularly spend multiples of my salary every month on various commitments my company makes, any small mistake could easily mean that its multiples of my salary type of problem within 10 days.
A friend of mine spent half a million on a storage device that we never used. It sat in the IT area for years until we were acquired. Everyone gave him so much shit. Finance asked me about it numerous times (going around my friend the CTO) so they could properly depreciate it. He didn't get dinged by the board at all. It remained an open secret. We were making million dollar decisions once a month, though.
> I regularly spend multiples of my salary every month on various commitments my company makes.
Yeah, same here.
But if I choose a vendor and that vendor fails us so catastrophically as to make us financially insolvent, then it's my job to have run a risk analysis and to have an answer for why.
If it's more cost effective to take an outage, that's fine, if it's not: then why didn't I have a DRP in place, why did we rely so much on one vendor, what's the exposure.
It's a pretty important part of being a serious business person.
Sure, but that's not what I said or you said, and my commentary was about relative measures of your salary to your budget.
If you can't make a mistake of your salary size in your budget then your budget is small or very tight, most corporations fuck up big multiples of their CTOs salary quarterly (but that turns out to be single digit percentage points of anything useful.)
> I'd be fired if I caused enough loss in revenue to pay my own salary for a year.
I'm not so sure.
I know of a major company that had a glitch, multiple times, that caused them to lose about ~15 million dollars at least once (a non-prod test hit prod because of a poorly designed too).
I was told the decision-makers decided not to fix the problem (the risk of losing more money again) because the "money had already been lost."
I am responsible for my choices. I'm CTO, I don't doubt that in some cases execs cover for each other, but at least I have anecdotal experience of what it would take for me to be fired- and this is clearly communicated to me.