Ask HN: What would you ask a Chief Technology Officer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What would you ask a Chief Technology Officer?

12 pointsandrewstuart9 comments

I'm podcast interviewing CTOs who have responsibility for software development, and I'm formulating questions.

What would you be interested to hear from a CTO in a podcast interview?

1. How do they keep on top of their technical debt ? 2. How do their peers especially CFO's perceive technology investments and processes ? 3. How they see their roles differentiating from CIO's ? 4. Their approach to build Vs buy 5. How do they keep abreast of Innovation and what do they invest in themselves staying upskilled ? 6. How often do they peer review the code or spend time with developers ? 7. What keeps them awake at night ? 8. Views and adoption of open source 9. What makes a good CTO in their opinion. 10. How are they approaching diversity and inclusion 11. How do they see the role of CTO changing in a few years ? 12. Do they genuinely believe they have a seat at the table ( at the board level )

"Ever had to let a person go? How did you handle the situation? Looking back how would you handle it now?"

"Which tools do you use for capacity planning and forecasting?"

"What's your approach to document the whole system? (bird's-eye view)"

"Do you see office IT (printers, wifi, broken mouse) as part of your job? Why, why not?"

Do they have a mechanism for product/service customer feedback to actually get to decisionmakers?

Daily, I see site issues, logic fails, missing features in apps and sites, but there is generally no mechanism for sharing my genius insights.

CTOs of companies of what size and what level of maturity? I'd ask very different questions of a CTO of a 5-person startup than the CTO of a 50-year-old multinational that employs tens of thousands.

What's the most important skill for a CTO, or the most difficult skill to learn? Infra? Managing? Product?

How come CTOs are "chief" technology officers, but no one else is referred to as a technology officer?

Isn't that true of most CxOs? I've always read CxO as “the corporate officer who is the chief of x” (well, with a special case for CEOs who are the chief of everything rather than the chief of executive.)

It's just a label that everyone understands.

Director of Technology

Information Technology Manager

VP of IT

VP of Ops

VP of Eng

Engineering Manager

They are all "technology Officers" who report to the Chief of Technology - where Technology is a broad umbrella covering all things not HR, not Business-Specific, not Sales, etc...

It is an apt title.

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