Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by formatjam 1790 days ago
Maybe?

"technical leader" for a 0-50 org is VERY different job than >100 org.

The CTO is probably very good at 0-1 type of start up work, and probably a cofounder and inexperienced eng leader.

But a experienced VP of eng is required to build teams and process later on. But usually those VP of eng are not good at building startups from the ground up.

So the solution here is either: - fire the CTO co-founder and replace them with a VP of eng type of talents - hire VP of eng and let the cofounder CTO focus on other works

I have seen both happened before.
1 comments
deanCommie 1789 days ago
I feel like you came to the same conclusion as me - you don't need both the CTO and a VP of Eng if the technical org is 40 people.
link
lmeyerov 1789 days ago
both?

- tech manager != tech leader, different skills

- CTO is like a Chief Science Officer at a biotech or seniormost Principal/Fellow Engineer at a bigger tech co: ~No boss and ~no reports. The more boring the core tech & scale, the less important to have.

- VP.E might do more on internal people processes, like run overall technical recruiting, while CTO stays involved like helping close candidates & joins bigger sales calls, but is overall more peripheral to the people management. They are not fully removed -- they might focus more on say code culture due to being an experienced technologist & deeply familiar with the core code.

- Both VP.E & CTO might say fix little bugs to make sure code culture is sane and help add productivity tools to the stack, but CTO will more likely run major arch advances & new system prototypes, while VP.E will help trains run on time by seeing ahead around coordination issues. Both need to be leaders (consensus building, ...), but one leads the company's technology and reads deeply on technology, and the other, its technologists, and reads deeply on management.

Lacking a good VP.E. leads to inability to ship: cannot execute tactically. Lacking a good CTO leads to a stagnant technology org: cannot execute strategically.

I suspect this changes at bigger scales, where my cynical side suspects, at most orgs, corp dev (M&A) > Office of CTO for technical leadership :(

link