Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to sound like an old fart, but it might be better to wait to write a blog post like that after you've spent some time experiencing engineering management in depth. It's very easy when capital is flowing freely and you've managed a team of 5 engineers to think that it's always going to be like that.

Ever been through an acquisition where 50% of the team was to be let go and you had to decide who and then tell them? Kill off a product after the team had almost completed it? Perform a lay off when times got bad? Give a serious, reasoned, estimated answer to the question (from the CEO): "How fast could we rewrite our entire code base from $FOO to Java?" Fire someone 20 years older than you and wonder quietly to yourself if he'd find another job? Manage more than a handful of engineers? Figure out how to outsource part of your development to India for financial reasons? Deal with a rapidly expanding customer base with creaking code? Manage a multi-million dollar budget when VCs aren't throwing money at you? Handle alleged sexual harassment? Spend hours and hours flying from customer to customer to explain your technology?

The 'pick which technology' to use part is easy and fun. Now go make that work in a real environment with real constraints.

My advice on becoming a CTO: learn how to write. You'll be spending a very large amount of time communicating your ideas.

As an old fart myself, and meaning absolutely no disrespect to anyone, I don't generally think of small startup CTOs when I hear the term CTO. I think of medium+ corporations where the CTO is at the top of significantly larger personnel structure than a company with 10-50 people. In my experience a CTO position at a small company is much more comparable to a mid-level manager or director slot at a larger organization.

Again, not intending to disrepect anyone, but that was my impression when reading this article -- I didn't feel like I was really listening to what my idea of a CTO is.

Yes, that's very true. Perhaps a good place to start is by not calling yourself CTO.

In that case there are no C level offices for startups because the CEO for a 5 person startup doesn't have the same responsibilities as the CEO for Leidos.

I think it's tempting for people to just say, well yes that's true, but there is no great line that is crossed that makes the distinction obvious.

It would be revolutionary for startups to start their org chart at the bottom, rather than the top. Programmer and BizDev, who get promoted as the company grows.

So you could get a job as Software dev 3 at Google for 250k, or as Programmer1 as a startup for 75k at a new startup.. why would you do the startup?

Let's face it.. title is one of the currencies of a startup. You want me to work for below market wage? Sure. I want equity to profit if we succeed, and I want a title that keeps me from having people hired over my head as we grow.

"and I want a title that keeps me from having people hired over my head as we grow"

I don't think that just a title will protect you. If you can handle managing 5 people but don't have the skills to manage 50 people, it's not going to be in the company's best interests to keep you on as the CTO. So you'll be offered the following options:

- Accept a demotion and report to the new CTO

- Be fired from your job and get replaced by the new CTO

If the company wants to avoid this unpleasantness, they can call your role something other than CTO, e.g., "Director of Development". Then, if the company grows, they can either promote you to CTO or hire a CTO to be your boss, depending on how promising you are.

I don't understand what the advantage is to have a lower title in your examples though: if you were CTO and someone gets inserted above you then your choices for your resume in your two scenarios are (CTO, then Director) or (only CTO, left company), which are both better than the two scenarios if you didn't have the CTO title (where it would say Director only).

If your title is Director someone might reasonably even assume there was a CTO above you at the tiny company, and you were a "director" or "vp" by being actually the absolute lowest man on the totem pole.

Title inflation is a thing making "CTO" almost meaningless, as documented elsewhere. Technical cofounder skills are not the same as CTO skills, so either they can be promoted into the gig when the company grows big enough to need CxOs or they can hire someone with the experience, desire, or greater aptitude.

My latter point was that widespread title inflation has the property that if you "defect" and don't have title inflation it has an actual negative effect on your future employment since it is nearly impossible for a random observer to know whether or not there was title inflation at your company.

As meaningless as "CTO" is, having a title worse than that could be seen as non-meaningless as a negative signal.

I think "founding programmer" or similar would counteract negative signals. It would certainly be more accurate.

To be sure, as someone who is good a greenfielding and hoisting startups, I would never want to be a CTO. Hire people above me, make "cofounder" just a particular percentage of equity and maybe a salary band, an enhancement on whatever my title is. Of course none of this protects me from getting Blaine'd and pushed out, but I figure that's always the case.

That all depends on the definition of a CTO of course, and that definition wildly fluctuates. Most software companies, big and small, startup or very mature, have a CTO, so the title is not reserved for big companies only imho. That does lead to confusion of what the CTO role actually is :)

That all depends on the definition of a CTO of course, and that definition wildly fluctuates.

These two things together render the term nearly meaningless.

There's a reason every developer is now an "engineer", people pick what sounds best on their resume.

But the problem is there isn't a better title.

I want a title that indicates that I'm the manager of a group of devs and that I also have final call on the technical side of the company.

Any ideas?

Head of development.

Beat me to it. Using "head" is a good scalable title. It works for both large and small sized organizations and for people who care about titles, it looks good on paper as well.

Chief architect. Director of engineering. VP of engineering.

As one of those "not-CEOs" I agree completely. I find it humorous how everyone in this thread is a "CTO". It's an overly glorified term used to negotiate certain conditions in start-up environments, usually: lower pay, longer hours, increased responsibility.

I make it a habit of not telling people my official title, unless I'm emailing support at one of our service providers...

My wife refused the "CTO" title at a smaller SMB (~250 headcount) because (A) she felt that the company was so small that it devalued the title, and (B) the title has already been so devalued elsewhere that it's actually a marketplace liability. "EVP Operations" was both more descriptive and more valuable, though not a "C-suite" title.

Largely agree here. We're a few years in (nowhere near "old") but I have seen a lot of these questions and these end up being the most humbling, but rewarding, experiences.

There's large swaths of CTOs who are only hired to code at early stage startups.

CTO is a real title with many overloaded definitions.

The duties also vastly depend on the industry/vertical.

Eg: I'm a CTO for an infra startup that sells to large companies. Part of my job is technology direction, part of it is sales, part of it is keeping the engineering team happy, and part of it is coding.

I'm imagining a CTO for a more cookie cutter SAAS startup would have a some overlap but a lot of differences.

A lot of my job is just aligning code being written to revenue and attaching ROI to projects being done.

I've become a way better communicator over the years by sheer force. Otherwise you can't get much done.

Technology at the end of the day is about delivering value to customers. A big part of the CTO's job is making sure that that happens.

Duties tend to change as teams grow too. The CTO title is a moving definition. Company vertical/business model and stage matter quite a bit here.

I would say overall, when you're small, you're just doing what a founder does: filling in the gaps till you are ready to hire someone better than you for the role you hand off.

This, and more, is where reality lies.

The other day there was a thread about the Google CTO test. I thought the entire thing was nothing less than ridiculous. I've hired many engineers and management over time. I don't care about anything someone can solve by having two bookcases full of relevant books by their desk.

I care about how the person things and how they solve problems they never had to face before.

None of the technologies I've worked with during the last 20 years existed when I was in school. FPGA's, for example, required a deep dive into a new universe of hardware design. The foundation helped, of course, but nobody would have hired me at the start of my first FPGA project, yet I developed technology for my own business that resulted in millions of dollars in sales.

The case is similar for management. I've been CTO/VP a couple of times before launching my own businesses. Didn't know what I was doing. I thought it was a technical job. Eventually I would joke that I had more business books by my bedside than engineering books anywhere in the house.

A person who is good at problem solving can learn and become good at anything. Be it CTO or developing the next ground-breaking idea in AI. That's why I don't care about resume's and truly senseless programming quiz interviews. They are useless.

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