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0 pointsbartonfink14y ago0 comments

No worries. My reply was basically to say that I know what to say to make my case, but I don't know how to make the CTO listen. This is his first CTO position, and up until August he was the only developer, so a lot of bad practices we have (e.g. no process whatsoever) are holdovers from the way he worked for a year and change. The obvious problem is that working alone dodges an awful lot of problems that arise when you have to work together. Now, we're running into these problems but the CTO isn't dealing with them - he just disengages whenever they get brought up and says something like "You're right, that's important, but first let's work on ...". Quite frustrating.

And again, no worries on the delete.

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Mz14y ago

FWIW: If you have a solution rather than a complaint, that tends to go over better and has more hope of being acted upon. Also, I have found that opportunistically grabbing people in the break room (by themselves, with no one around) and talking for a minute is sometimes way more effective than the formal process I am supposed to go through (proviso: I am not in IT).

Take care.

davidhansen14y ago

To be fair, this is not an easy transition to make, if good processes weren't started from day one, which is the standard state of most early startup technical projects.

Everything from source control commit logging, to conflict resolution, to development database snapshot sanitation scripts, to audit/error log management, to configuration management, to compliance, to QA handoff, to deployment automation, etc. These things are not trivial to begin working on while training new hires, working on new feature requests and existing bug lists, at a time when 99% of domain knowledge is in that person's head. And all of them are necessary for your CTO to be able to delegate effectively for his role.

Not knowing anything about your exact situation, my guess is that none of these things were properly set up from the beginning, and now your CTO is faced with nearly impossible circumstances that he's either unwilling or embarrassed to acknowledge. He may believe that trying to explain to the other stakeholders about the importance of process and technical debt reduction will go over poorly in the face of increasing business requirements that must be done nownownow. Horrible approach, but it happens, and happens often.

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