Comment by zeptonaut22 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeptonaut22 | Hacker News Reader

As an early-stage CTO, I really appreciated this insight-from-the-future about how my role might change over time if we're ultimately successful.

One interesting difference with our company is that I hit the bottleneck of "I need to be doing more spec work and less engineering work" more quickly - possibly because we were relying on contractors who couldn't (or wouldn't) take on as much of that spec work themselves. I started to really feel this pain point at 3-4 other full-time engineers, where I was sort of trying to stay ahead of them and make sure that upcoming features were fully specc'ed and met the business needs as opposed to chipping in and coding myself.

I'm definitely tinted by my own experience, but it seems like 8-10 other engineers is a really late point to hit this bottleneck - did you have a PM that was also working to help plan the features to reduce this burden on you?

I was a CTO for a little more than two years. When I joined we had 3 people as direct reports which grew to around 12 when I left. Besides hiring people, all I felt like I was doing was product manager work with talking to clients about their requirements and putting those into stories, tasks etc. Additionally I would pull together discussions on the evolution of our stack and handle the finances around the cloud implementations of our technology (on Azure). What else does a CTO do? I deeply disliked it because I was working for 14 hours a day most of which was dead time but communication was frequent enough that I couldn’t do anything else.

Hi, author here. I would probably agree with that. We only managed to go that far because the first engineers were quite experienced and super proactive. We also had a PM (essentially part time, since he was in charge of other areas too) and the CEO giving a lot of product direction.

It would have been really hard to do with more junior people (or contractors) without process. We are in a better place now, and planning to start hiring more junior people next year. I think without the correct support structure and process in place, we would have done a disservice to jr engineers. It's part of my focus now, though.

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