Hacker News Reader

Comment by omarchowdhury | Hacker News Reader

How can someone become a CTO without having any clue about tech?

I have worked with a lot of CTOs or similar. Sometimes CTO is a title that can approve large budgets and an effective CTO is actually their direct report.

Being a CTO is less about technology and more about understanding the global technical landscape, accounting and legal implications to large budget decision making. If I, for example, choose Microsoft as a vendor will that impact our Pacific market and if so what is the cost benefit? These are not trivial choices. To an extent a lot of the job is risk mitigation, reducing liability for the company.

A good analogy would be a CEO of a shipping company not knowing how to sail. They will know costs of the voyage, costs associated with the voyage, etc. but not the day to day of how a ship operates. And they don’t need to. If anyone has worked with a micromanager they’d appreciate this.

Sure but sometimes this lack of knowledge will cripple a company. I've had a VP(who had a role similar to the cto for the department) who picked what time series database we should use based on this technology being the best one from a business standpoint. Unfortunately the technology was so bad from a technical standpoint that every single project that used it had it's budget and timeline explode 4-6x. This seems like an exaggeration but it isn't. One literally wrote a working application in 6 months then was mandated to move to the new technology (basically rewriting the application) and they spent 2 years rewriting while still leverage a lot of the code they already wrote.

And I feel like 100s of these decision are made everyday by executives who oversee but don't grok software.

My bet is opentsdb?

Out of more than idle curiosity, what was the TSDB?

I would say but it's a small proprietary one that only the company I was working for used. So mentioning it doesn't help any devs avoid a mistake and outs the project.

In a big enough company where software isn't the product that just means they know the tech that applies to that company. The CIO is probably a fearful late career IT politician and the CTO could have spent 40 years progressively learning more about washing machines or planes.

That's pretty much it. There is also a widespread belief that software development is "IT" which means that an initiative to implement cloud systems gets led by people who have experience with desktop deployments or firewall setup. There is a lot of politics around budgets so the IT department won't let go of that power.

I read in Werners Vogels blog (amazon CTO), that there are four types of CTOs [1] based on Berray and Sampath paper. [2]

* Infrastructure Manager

* Technology Visionary and Operations Manager

* External Facing Technologist

* Big Thinker

[1] https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/07/the_different_c...

[2] http://www.brixtonspa.com/Career/The_Role_of_the_CTO_4Models...

That list is not exhaustive. One might also encounter "Peter Principle Beneficiary".

Another bit that not many people know is that CTOs at big non-tech corps can just pay a consultant to literally tell them what to do (most of the big banks do this) and consulting firms make a ton of money providing this service (namely places like Deloitte etc).

I have the feeling that's how IT is done at my company. They have a huge number of outsourced contractors in India and the US and not very many people who really understand technology and can move things forward.

“IT politician” is a great phrase, I will be stealing that - thanks!

Business analysts, attorneys, finance people and IT turned PM/administrative all manage to rise to high technical positions due to business savvy and political ability.

I worked in a place with a CIO who didn’t know how to operate a TV. If you aren’t a tech company, it’s often a liability to have too much tech domain knowledge.

It's more about the degree than practical reasons in many cases.

Or a security chief without any clue about tech (let alone security):

https://it.slashdot.org/story/17/09/15/1910200/equifax-ceo-h...

It's still relatively common for people in IT in general and security specifically to have no formal background in it, so citing what someone did ages ago in university isn't all that convincing to establish lack of "clue about tech".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com