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10 steps to finding your CTO, guaranteed (joshrweinstein.com)
4 points by joshwprinceton 5070 days ago
1 comments

So, this is a pretty decent advice. Basically, the author's idea is that if you:

- Treat finding a CTO like a full-time job,

- Learn to build some basic HTML,

- Read a book on Ruby / Git / Rails,

You should be able to find a good CTO for your company.

Unfortunately, while this is some pretty good starter advice, I doubt this would help you find a great CTO, first engineer, whatever.

Smart people typically want to be around other smart people, and the idea that building a simple HTML page and reading through a single book will let you find an amazing programmer to really build your product is, unfortunately, not realistic.

Great programmers look for:

- Interesting technical challenges,

- To be treated as equals, and have a large amount of influence over technologies, product decisions, etc.,

- Highly motivated, smart people they can learn from,

- Great compensation,

- A very strong sense of purpose and direction.

If you're a business person who can offer all of the above, you'll probably have a great chance of finding a really awesome tech person to work with.

Unless you plan on really getting great with HTML or something of the sort, it's probably a better idea to instead learn to use a tool like balsamiq (http://www.balsamiq.com/) and make some really amazing wireframes instead. At least doing things this way, you'll have a really clean skeleton to show off to people, and help them understand your vision.

If you're looking for a programmer out there--best of luck!