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Roles: mostly management or CTO. Usually, but not always, recruited by the management team, but bounced in the early stages of the process. Most memorable was being told I was unqualified for a role because I did not clearly whiteboard how to use some aspect of the Spring Framework. Memorable because: the company did not use Java. At all. Was a RoR shop. Another time I was recruited to step in as an "emergency" CTO, like, could I start Monday (this was the preceding Wednesday) because the technology team was melting down under the current CTO. One catch: they wanted the current CTO to interview me to get his opinion. You can guess how well that went. I did not pitch myself as a hardcore techie and did not apply for roles which appeared to be hardcore technical roles. The CTO roles I interviewed for were really CIO roles, management, process, that sort of thing, with some technical awareness. But what I find is companies want to hire hard core technical people for these roles, and then have a mutual miserable experience as they learn that knowing everything there is to know about the latest whizbang framework does not necessarily guarantee that person will be great at hiring, managing people and process and projects or negotiating the growth of the organization. Sure, there are hardcore technical CTO roles, but I mostly avoided those. And not so much because I didn't know the technical aspects, but it's not where my strengths are. I find companies avoid hiring managers as managers, in either startups or large organizations. They seem to prefer promoting their senior most technical people into management, even at the expense of that person's technical skills atrophying while they stumble through learning how to manage people or projects or products or whatever. And you know, peace. This is how people think technology organizations should operate. Not my job to fix technology recruiting or personnel management. |