What it really means to be a CTO

Re:What it really means to be a CTO by j_baker on Monday November 15, 2010 @06:17PM (#1908322)

Personally, I see the CTO's job as being the one to advocate pristine, perfect code at the expense of business objectives. The reason is simple: if they don't, nobody else will. Of course the business side of the organization is always going to be pushing for more features at the expense of code quality. Why? Well, they're not the ones who will take the blame for code sucking.

If you give in to them too many times and end up with buggy code where trivial changes take a month, but has all the features that are needed where do you think the blame will fall? I can guarantee you it isn't going to be the business side.

The goal shouldn't be for the CTO to be the business side's technical henchman. It should be to look after the technical side of things. If a rewrite is the best decision technically (without considering the business), then that's what the CTO should advocate, but they need to be willing to work with the business side to find a solution that works for both sides.

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Re:What it really means to be a CTO by babar on Monday November 15, 2010 @07:32PM (#1908536)

The CTO needs to be part of the executive team, so they don't have the luxury of ignoring the business objectives. The CTO should be able to make a business case for investing in quality engineering. Quality engineering has benefits for the business, but they are not always worth the price.

Engineers are the only ones who can advocate for pristine code without tradeoffs, and I would argue that great engineers care enough about the business to not do that. Really great engineers just build the pristine code in the same amount of time regular engineers would have taken to get a simple version almost-working.

I actually like the idea of "technical henchman", though!

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Re:What it really means to be a CTO by alttab on Monday November 15, 2010 @08:08PM (#1908636)

Really great engineers just build the pristine code in the same amount of time regular engineers would have taken to get a simple version almost-working.

This has been key in my experience. I'll build a feature that is flexible, clean, well factored, and completely documented in the same time it requires someone else to make a half working mess.

CTO's as I'd like to understand them bring the bar as high as they can within business constraints. Doing any less is accepting mediocrity. Is that something you'd want in an executive leadership role?

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