Can someone help me understand what is going on with the mods or the ranking algorithm here? This post was on the front page this morning, dropped from #19 to #50 within in one minute.<p>Then it reappeared on the front page for a good two hours, now mysteriously dropped from #9 to #50 within one minute.<p>It's like there is a bot or mod that is flagging it down to #50. I'm beginning to suspect I'm cursed or someone has it out for posts from this domain! Kind of disappointing since I worked really hard on this piece. I've read how the ranking algorithm works but I don't have a voting ring and there is no flame war happening here. Sad face.
Great series. One thing I'm missing though, but it could just be me, is that being the CTO in my experience is often a <i>lonely</i> job.<p>Everyone else is focused on either business or tech. You're usually the only one that sees both. There's nobody to spar with on the whole picture, you have to make decisions with far reaching consequences on your own.
I'm confused that none of them expressed fear of being the target of a serious DDoS attack. Is it regarded as such a black swan event that it's not even in the radar?
Great insights here. I think there is a common pattern - one that I've experienced as well. Growing a new piece of technology with no customers to an evolved product that scales and has a growing engineering team behind it introduces lots of new issues that have to be dealt with. I'm not necessarily a process freak, but from my experience, having a few solid processes really goes a long way and should be put in place early. Especially revolving around communication of issues and development priorities. When there's a major fire or conflict on teams, there's a big microscope that should be looked through in order to add improvements that will help a company get past future stages of growth more smoothly.
Great series! This is my first year as a CTO and I can relate to most of their stories already. It is hard to move away from your comfortable technical zone and have to start to worry more about the non-tech side of the business. A big challenge are the soft skills... once you become CTO you have to deal with a lot more people than with computers. The technical side is a huge challenge as well, but these are fun issues to deal with, although some do keep me awake at night :)<p>I'm learning a lot reading these interviews, so a big THANKS to the author!
Nice interviews. I really enjoyed reading the answer of Alex Haro to the last 2 days worries. It definitely conveys the fact that technical issues are one component of the job, the others being often more human-related. Software engineers often their have strong opinions (and usually for the best) and making all work together, without going in a techie fight, can sometimes be a real juggling act.
In people's experience, how big does a non-tech company have to be before you can expect the CTO to be really wrong or behind with current practises, hardware and so on?
Great interview. Now can we get an interview series with founders/business owners and ask them what business problems/pains they wish someone could solve for them? :)
fantastic, really like this series that shows people going beyond the early "i have a technology insight that'll work well" to leading the business.<p>thank you.