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Comment by deanCommie | Hacker News Reader

This is silly. Of course I understand that because of scaling a 50-person org will have one "technical leader" who is, by definition, the CTO, and they might only have 12 reports.

But you don't now need to introduce additional abstractions when you go from 50 to 125. Why introduce a VP of engineering? Can the CTO not handle 3 extra director reports (4 if you add a "director" of QA with 2 reports?) Come on. Who is going to come on to be the "VP of engineering" for a startup, yet not have/want oversight for Security, Analytics, and Infrastructure?

Also in the 50 person startup, the product lead with 5 reports is a "Director" but a product lead with 11 reports is a "VP"? Get outta here, this is silly. It's the exact same role. It is NOT more scope or oversight.

There should be orders of magnitude size growths before you start overthinking the difference between a director and a VP, or introducing new layers.

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Maybe?

"technical leader" for a 0-50 org is VERY different job than >100 org.

The CTO is probably very good at 0-1 type of start up work, and probably a cofounder and inexperienced eng leader.

But a experienced VP of eng is required to build teams and process later on. But usually those VP of eng are not good at building startups from the ground up.

So the solution here is either: - fire the CTO co-founder and replace them with a VP of eng type of talents - hire VP of eng and let the cofounder CTO focus on other works

I have seen both happened before.

I feel like you came to the same conclusion as me - you don't need both the CTO and a VP of Eng if the technical org is 40 people.

both?

- tech manager != tech leader, different skills

- CTO is like a Chief Science Officer at a biotech or seniormost Principal/Fellow Engineer at a bigger tech co: ~No boss and ~no reports. The more boring the core tech & scale, the less important to have.

- VP.E might do more on internal people processes, like run overall technical recruiting, while CTO stays involved like helping close candidates & joins bigger sales calls, but is overall more peripheral to the people management. They are not fully removed -- they might focus more on say code culture due to being an experienced technologist & deeply familiar with the core code.

- Both VP.E & CTO might say fix little bugs to make sure code culture is sane and help add productivity tools to the stack, but CTO will more likely run major arch advances & new system prototypes, while VP.E will help trains run on time by seeing ahead around coordination issues. Both need to be leaders (consensus building, ...), but one leads the company's technology and reads deeply on technology, and the other, its technologists, and reads deeply on management.

Lacking a good VP.E. leads to inability to ship: cannot execute tactically. Lacking a good CTO leads to a stagnant technology org: cannot execute strategically.

I suspect this changes at bigger scales, where my cynical side suspects, at most orgs, corp dev (M&A) > Office of CTO for technical leadership :(

A 40 person Eng. Org. is not going to be led by one person with a bunch of direct reports.

IT and Eng. roles will probably be sub divided.

Instead of a VP it might be possible to have just a manager or director, but it depends on the seniority of the people you're bringing in.

The CTO's job is not just downward focus, they have strategic things to to.

A few titles could be mushed around but it's just about right.

For the VP product with only 11 reports - that's a staff position, it doesn't have to imply a lot of headcount.

You might have a Colonel in charge of an entire Regiment of Soldiers, but another Colonel in charge of a much smaller detachment of Medics, or Intel, Communications, or even just a Chief of Staff etc..

Aside from handing out VP roles to possibly people that are too young or inexperienced, the 'tree' itself is just about right.

The problem is the tree is imbalanced. The CTO has an org of 40, with 1 VP report, 3 director reports, and 2 IC's.

The VP has 28 - the vast majority of the org.

This role is redundant at this size, and wasteful.

Just have one technical leader who maanged SIX directors (and 4 IC's, and it is still a reasonable size team. What is the VP of Eng providing here that the CTO can't do?

BTW, arguably this is still true at the Series C 400-sized company. The technical org is 114, but the VP of Eng managed 92 of them.

I think the mistake you are doing is that these are primarily titles. It does not 100% correspond to what they actually do particularly at C level. If you are a CTO of a startup you frigging do everything for a long time. You want people to fully focus on the daily challenges of technical projects. You can call them VP of eng of whatever you want.

Have you ever managed 16 people? It gets hard after around 8 direct reports.

Consider that at 16 direct reports, 8 hours a week is spent just having 1:1s

Delegate. Dump the 1:1s and institute peer coaching if necessary.

Would never work for a manager who doesn't think 1:1s are important

Nothing new will ever work for certain manager types that can only work the way they are used to workingm, aren't very introspective, and don't think about problems beyond the surface.

In my experience much of what gets discussed 1:1s should be discussed with the larger group during retro times. This can be setup for anonymous feedback if that makes people more comfortable(it also comes with benefits anyone involved so you can "read the room").

Coaching can work well with a rotating peer coaching setup.

Now you can get 20+ people with leads reporting to a single person who owns the employee relationships. Dump all the useless middle management.

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