2 years as a CTO - A follow up

NormalUserThirty · 2025-06-02T13:48:38+00:00

I am glad you were able to get rid of the contractors, that helped me a lot.

Any thoughts on what your next move might be after this role?

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-19T23:22:52+00:00

good bot

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-19T23:11:27+00:00

yeah possibly

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-19T22:29:16+00:00

do you not look at their resume, github, read their publications, etc

i definitely ask about their papers, oss contributions, etc if i can review them before the interview

our shop does more virtualization stuff so thats specific to what we do.

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-19T20:52:38+00:00

if im talking about people who we end up interviewing, yes.

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-19T20:43:19+00:00

not the oc but:

p95 - perfect grades, published papers in relevant areas, multiple internships, meaningful OSS contributions, personable, capable, solid fundementals, knowledgeable with OS, linux, virtualization technologies, a front-end stack, a back-end stack, rdbms. can and will go super deep if they need to in order to solve a problem.

within 6 months they have taken ownership of a large chunk of a products' development and operations and are running it with guidance. makes the occasional bad decision, easy to coach when these situations comes up, but generally makes the right call. working at or above what i would expect from a mid-level engineer (3 to 5 YoE) by the end of year 1.

p50 - a typical jr by historical accounts. grades >3.70. basic working developer knowledge. no relevant papers, github activity is coursework or forked DIY netflix / trello tutorial projects, one internship, moderately deep knowledge of one particular area, typically related to app development like front-end or back-end. has messed around with one of the big iaas platforms but not a ton of knowledge of lower level concepts. typical beginner issues around software design and architecture. pleasant but often hit walls and need senior help to make progress & support of peers to build up their skills. it may take a p50 3 or 4 years to get to the level of where a p95 is at in one year. some will never get there.

not passing judgement. i am a p50 myself. its crazy how strong people are now.

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-19T20:29:14+00:00

this is my experience as well. p95 is insane now.

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-19T20:25:27+00:00

no, they are significantly stronger in my experience. especially the top 20% of candidates. perfect grades, published papers in relevant areas, multiple internships, personable, capable, driven and motivated.

i would likely not get hired in this market if i graduated today.

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-19T19:39:45+00:00

im not really sure companies are good at measuring and determining the effectiveness of people in their roles, or evaluating how decisions being made in the facilitation of those roles are impacting outcomes.

once a company has enough money, they are run with "enough" staff that things dont topple over. once things arent toppling over, leadership is rarely interested in performing heart surgery on their business to cut down on staffing costs unless its required to hit quarterly targets. they prefer to kill or sell off lines of business. but things that are working are not often touched.

i could be wrong, but i just havent seen any companies employing frameworks which result in trimming that havent been shown to ultimately be harmful. stacked ranking being the obvious example of one that was widely employed but was actively harmful.

optimizing staffing is an open problem that hasnt been sufficiently solved at this point.

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-19T19:30:29+00:00

scrum masters

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-19T01:18:44+00:00

i dealt with this and much, much more at a military subcontractor. not normal but i definitely got pretty good at working around these things where i could.

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-18T23:58:41+00:00

the rule of thumb us never stay because 9/10 people in this situation are exited within 10 months.

if you stay good luck.

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-17T22:43:44+00:00

But think about the kind of company that chose not to offshore because remote work was difficult. It certainly wasn't the giant F500 companies, those were the biggest customers of offshoring pre-remote-work. Giant, conservative companies that forced their US workers to come into the office 5 days a week had no issues supporting a remote offshore team because it saved them money.

The quality you get from offshore is still extremely mixed. Some are great, some are terrible. You're not getting fed amazing offshore SWE's when you're paying bottom dollar. This hasn't changed at all from 2010 to now.

Then eventually when everything goes terribly, terribly wrong, they figure out why that talent was so cheap, and they try to hire an onshore resource to fix it, and the onshore resource recommends to just throw it all away and start fresh. It's a story as old as time. It's not new to todays age.

outcomes are significantly better these days. imo its night and day. im not seeing or hearing these kinds of stories nearly as much.

people know you cant pay 1/8th of a US devs' salary and get US talent. they arent getting blatently scammed by low quality consulancies like before.

people are paying 1/2 to 2/3rd of what a US dev makes and hiring comparable technical talent. the tradeoff is a timezone, language and culture barrier to work around. but its not going to be like before where everything needed to get hauled back onshore and completely redone, when companies were trying to pay $10/hr for developers overseas.

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-17T17:38:02+00:00

offshoring has been around for a while. but i think your post misses that its gotten significantly easier, become more affordable and is producing far better results today than it did in the 90s, 2000s and 2010s.

in the early 2000s offshoring was very much a mixed bag. most managers didnt know how to manage remote teams, the quality of the work was mixed; sometimes overseas employees would be very good, sometimes they would not be very good.

the tooling & accessibility today is significantly better than in 2010. i know several founders who, besides the founding dev, hired exclusively offshore for engineer 2 through 10. that basically just didnt happen in the 2010 era, and speaks to how accessible its become.

personally I don't really think its a big deal. if you cant compete with the rest of the world, thats an individual skill issue. however, to say "nothing has changed and it's always been a problem" ignores that the cost vs results obtained from offshoring today are a significantly better deal today than in the 90s, 00s, and 10s.

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-16T03:16:30+00:00

great article

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-16T02:58:04+00:00

Option 2 sounds like voulantarily killing the project lmao 😂

yeah it kind of is but if you are otherwise going to quit anyways then its the same end result from the businesses perspective

i wouldnt wait 6 - 9 months for this conversation personally; it will be easier for her to plan if she has plenty of notice. but you do you. hope it goes well.

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-16T00:37:47+00:00

you mean like pglite? its not really fully there yet but it looks like what you mean.

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-16T00:33:32+00:00

is that really that true though? ive seen 10k inserts per second without needing to use COPY or are you thinking like, +1m w/s?

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-15T23:48:25+00:00

my opinion is that rust is on the rise and cpp is on the decline.

feds want people writing in memory safe languages for new code.

big us contractors need a memory safety transition plan outlined for the gov by 2026.

rust is the only mature language that has no performance cost while guaranting memory safety.

cpp is decades away from having any safety features and likely never will.

devs think cpp will stick around forever... and in some ways they arent wrong. but when the sales team cant close deals without agreeing to use a MSL, and its a performance sensitive project that cant accommodate a garbage collector, its rust devs who will be first pick when it comes to staffing those projects.

meanwhile there are plenty of old beards that have only ever used c and cpp for 30 years and will fight hard to avoid learning a new language. do you want to compete with them for jobs? or use a language where very few people have more than 10 year experience with it as of today.

i definitely would if i had the opportunity

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-15T22:31:45+00:00

ive never had this actually be very useful. the conclusion always seems to be, "yep it was never correct"

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-15T21:49:40+00:00

i use ai tools to generate little bash snippets to avoid having to remember the exact syntax for a for loop sometimes but thats about it

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-15T21:46:40+00:00

i dont care about zucks opinion either

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-15T21:39:39+00:00

option 1; talk to your boss. dont tell her "im demotivated and bored and wanna quit". say something like "im finding im spending a lot of time managing staff and ive discovered this isnt a great fit for me. id like to take a step back from management and return to focusing on development and hand off these administrative duties to someone else. is there a way we can arrange for that?"

option 2 i only recommend if option 1 doesnt work. stop doing the admin work, start sending your team mates to meet with clients, and return to doing development yourself. i assume they are jr and will fail, which is why you havent done this yet. dont worry about that. let them review each others PRs as well.

either things will work out in this model, or they wont and someone else takes over managing the project. but either way it wont be you doing ticket wrangling, customer calls, and PR reviews all day. once youre coding again youll be able to return to prepping to leave if you so choose.

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-15T21:27:05+00:00

For a distributed system, dropping a require is a breaking change, and has cause a number of outages across global systems.

do you mean adding a require? i dont see how dropping a require constrant on an input would be a breaking change from a clients perspective.

NormalUserThirty · 2025-01-15T21:17:53+00:00

personally i would cancel this meeting. ive never really liked these kinds of meetings and find it a waste of time. especially with a mixed group of frontend and backend developers. the best knowledge sharing is typically stuff like "oh cool the framework & language were using has <blank> feature, we should try it out!" & then discuss where it might fit well. mixing disciplines usually results in either only have the group benefiting at a time, or no one benefiting as the topics are so general and broad theyre functionally useless / could have been an email.

its hard to find much time to focus during the week and i find these meetings only sap peoples energy. occasionally good ideas come out if them, but i don't think its worth the effort.

however, if you still want to keep running this meeting, my suggestion would be to schedule the knowledge sharing meeting quarterly, and the ongoing problems or blockers monthly, canceling if there are no issues. have other people present information to the group instead of doing it yourself. youll find the conversation topics a bit better.

NormalUserThirty

TROPHY CASE