My experience tells me that a good IT company must have a strong and charismatic CTO, and a bad company must have a mediocre, slick and sophisticated CTO. You can look at this rule from foreign companies such as Microsoft and Google to the local Alibaba and Taobao, and then look at the company where you have worked, and you will have a judgment. The most reliable is the grassroots type, and the most risky is the parachuting of an older executive as CTO.
1) Errors are all top-down
When things are chaotic, people always seek to rely on the formulation of Process. Many managers are aware of the out-of-control of things, but do not understand the root cause. They always want to formulate and invent many processes and assessment systems, through compulsory, These processes are fixed and pushed hard to reverse the situation. The employees at the bottom are treated as thieves to prevent and treat them. As a result, mistakes are added to mistakes, people's hearts are scattered, and the situation is even more out of control.
A simple logic of thinking is that when clothes are buttoned incorrectly, it is usually when the first button is buttoned, not the button you found wrong.
Therefore, the correct order of thinking should be: the success is in the people, the people first, then the process, and then the process, evaluation, and system. If there is a mistake, it must be a mistake. Then the beautiful 3P (Plan, Process, Project), if not The support, implementation, and implementation of appropriate talents are useless.
Chaos is always from top to bottom, not from below to above. Unfortunately, many managers hold the opposite logic.
2) CTO must have technical charm
CTO, first, chief technology officer, technology should be in the first place. Many people go to the side of business vision and other nonsense at every turn. Now the discussion is the first condition. Without technology, it is better to call CEO.
I still like my first company very much. The company’s CTO has affected my future development path. I have been following the technical route unswervingly in the past few years, all under his influence. The company’s CTO has the following Features:
1. Frequently study technology, have scarce hair, and follow the technical route with one mind. Because of the rapid changes in technology between 1996 and 2000, he led the company's major technical architecture transformations from VB, PB, DELPHI, Java, and DotNet. What is done below is a fundamental guarantee from the upper level that there is no crookedness or intrigue.
2. The understanding of technology is very deep, and the understanding of technical talents is very deep. The selection of talents and the formation of R&D teams are all personally experienced. Therefore, the selected PM and TL are naturally not mediocre. People who are close to him should not be sloppy people. When the company is developing rapidly, more and more projects are needed, and more and more PM, TL, and PL are needed. A large number of talents are coming in quickly. When he and his high-level technical team have gone through the iron gate, they will not destroy the company's technical heritage and cultural atmosphere.
3. Be charismatic and frank. Although he has a bad temper, he can also handle Politics and conflict, and is like the god Yuchi Jingde at the rural gate, deterring the villain from making trouble.
My ups and downs of technical management experience and a lot of consultant experience in the past few years have made me have seen and experienced the rise and fall of many companies. Many people think that my understanding of CTO is very superficial, but they make mistakes and mistakes. The root cause.
I think the most important thing for a CTO is to love technology, understand technology, select technical talents, and know people well. As for the so-called execution ability, strategic vision, planning, and proficiency in various processes and leadership, that is something later, and only antecedents can promote consequences.
When I was a PM in a large e-commerce company in Shenzhen, I got a lot of things. When I was training traditional companies, I always used him as a case. This company has gone through three stages within two years:
1. Establishment: When the company was established, there were only a few dozen people. The CTO was a 40-year-old who came from Hong Kong. The background was not clear. The first impression was amiable and friendly. Since the parent company is very rich, the company relies on It burned money and expanded quickly. The total number of people in the company has reached more than 2,000 in one and a half years, and the technical team has quickly expanded to more than 100.
2. Confusion: At this time, after rapid expansion, the company has been completely messed up. Because the CTO does not understand technology, it is impossible to select good technical talents and can only rely on headhunting and HR. Therefore, the department managers below can It is conceivable that, one after another, they and the middle-level technical team, which is rapidly influx and have not been selected by real technology, constitute a chaos in the world.
3. Reform: When there is chaos, no matter how faint the people are, they also want to restore order. In particular, there are still some good and conscientious technical stalwarts in the team who want to reverse the situation, plan configuration management, and build a structure. According to the characteristics of the e-commerce website, introduce a reasonable release system from user needs to development, testing, and launch. Although these are low-level measures, they cannot fundamentally change the situation, but after all It is a new atmosphere for developers and users from the local area. However, the chaos continues to raging. The high-level leaders have introduced many so-called management talents who are good at process improvement. The CTO architect team proposed by the technical school is organized by the CTO who does not have the ability to grasp the technology. The main structure is The teacher is an engineer who originally outsourced to Huawei, and in the end it directly resulted in a new version of the company, a development team of more than 80 people, which only went live in one and a half years. Therefore, if you change it or not, you must fail.
With the support of the parent company, this company has changed a CEO and still survives tenaciously. I have to go to the website from time to time. I can still see that those are my hard work. It is really helpless and helpless. Ah, I once made up my mind to work in a company for a lifetime, and I really hope they can get out of the predicament.
3) Recruit CTO, don't be greedy for fame
I would like to say to all persons in charge of recruiting technical talents:
1. Do not recruit pure management talents who claim to be good at process improvement. Without the support of technical experience, it is Zhao Kuo talking about soldiers and Fusha building a building. This is iron-blooded experience and is not convinced. You can recruit these people to carry out suicide attacks on the company.
2. Recruit CTOs. Don’t recruit high-level managers from overseas returnees, Ph.Ds, and large companies. The probability of cheating is more than 50%. Even managers of large companies have long been numb to technology. The long-term Yinggeyan dance, the world is peaceful , The sense of technology has been lost, and in fact has become a fat-headed man parasitizing on the huge organizational structure. Without this environment, he will not survive for long. What they are best at now is not technology, but relationship. They are already proficient in sophistication, corporate politics, client public relations, conference speeches, Tai Chi pushing hands, compromise, and balance techniques. The most frightening thing is that there is no sharp judgment or bold decision-making power.
3. If you need a CTO, try to search from within the company, looking for people who are honest and passionate, willing to make the company better, have a conscience, have a broad vision, and pursue technology. If it does not, cast a net outside.
4. Advocating big names is generally self-defeating. The advantage of being born and raised is that it is practical, pragmatic, humble, and has a deep understanding of the problem. It is not radical, not aggressive, does not burn money, and will not move at all to come up with the so-called big changes and big hands.
4) Only a CTO who understands technology can handle the causal relationship between technology and management
It is very ironic that people and companies who despise technology and respect technology are always one, will always make the technology ruin, and the mess of technology and management will always appear at the same time:
1. I often do technical consultations for small and medium-sized enterprises. I found that when many traditional enterprise bosses invested millions of dollars in IT, they were coaxed by the formed IT team and lost their money.
2. Many foreign-funded enterprises are very rich. The IT projects in the company have an annual budget of tens of millions, but they are rarely successful. They all go to the pockets of outsourcing companies. Not to mention that state-owned enterprises spend a lot of money on projects. No one uses the money after the money is used. Like foreign companies, the phenomenon of no one using the money after the hard work goes online is endless. In multinational companies such as HP and Sony, there are so many legacy projects. HP's newly appointed CIO once slashed down the legacy system drastically and did not see any lives. This is actually the ecological chain. Without the raging demand of users, there would be no outsourcing boom.
3. The management costs caused by technical confusion, such as the loss of core personnel, frequent recruitment costs, and project delays, are far greater than the benefits of a new order on the market.
4. Many bosses only know how to reduce operating costs by saving office consumables and toilet paper, but they never realize the power of technological improvement, which brings about efficiency gains, staff reduction, and cost reduction. In IT, the biggest investment and the biggest cost are people. The first purpose of business operation is to increase Productivity for the sake of Productivity, the first of which is to improve people and improve people's ideological awareness of technology understanding.
5. People who admire management try their best to get rid of the dependence on technology, only to find that they think that if they understand technology, they must not understand management, and how stupid the idea of understanding management and technology is. Every manager should take a look. In the history of the Song Dynasty, the founding of the Song Dynasty unified the country from warlords. It hated military power. It also suppressed and restricted military personnel. The price of civilian officials was higher than military officials. Civil officials despised military generals. Yue Fei and other four major anti-gold generals were all committed by their own people. When he died, Xin Qiji had no choice but to report to the country, so he could only drunk and watch the sword with the lamp, and dreamed of blowing the horns. Caused the weakness of the Song Dynasty for more than a hundred years, from Khitan to Xia, from Jin to Mongolia, as long as a nation can ride a horse, it can get a vote.
Knowledgeable people who want to properly handle the causal relationship between management and technology can study the operating conditions of outsourcing companies and use them as a case. I worked as an architect, consultant, and BA in a foreign company and was responsible for outsourcing. Enterprise outsourcing. The whole process of tracking the project has brought me close contact with outsourcing companies, and I found:
- A technology company that needs technology but despise it is an outsourcing company
- Technicians don’t like technology. They look down on themselves and look down upon themselves. The most serious phenomenon is the outsourcing company.
- The most advocating process management, the most rigorous process system and the most chaotic and dirty management are also outsourcing companies.
- Outsourcing companies have the highest turnover rate of talent each year.
- Most of the mobile talent centers in outsourcing companies are technical talents.
- The dream of most engineers in outsourcing companies is not to do their own technical work, but to be PL and PM in management positions.
- The final result is that the most technical positions in outsourcing companies, CTO, BA, QA, Achitect, TL, are technically mediocre people with superficial understanding of technology.
6. What is ironic and contradictory is that the salary of senior technical positions in outsourcing companies is very high. Ten to twenty thousand are normal, which is much higher than the salary of genuine technical personnel in traditional software companies.
5) A good CTO has the ability to identify talents
Many people once said with great ambition that one day I have a good idea, and then I drive a group of people to realize this idea. In fact, there are thousands of projects in VC every year, and they all claim to have a good idea. Idea, there is only a shortage of money now, nothing else.
In fact, it is wrong. VC is not only looking at your project, but also looking at your team. The correct logic should be reversed. There is no shortage of Ideas and money. What is lacking is talents. If you have a good Idea, do you have the ability, vision, and judgment to find people, even if you find them, you I don't want to think about it. Why do you think he is a high-end talent? Why do those high-end talents come to your temple? Do you have this judgment?
So I said that the selection of technical talents starts with the CTO, and the most important duty of the CTO is to recruit reasonable technical talents. It is too superficial to measure CTO only from big names, popularity, and academic qualifications. To select CTOs, use more pragmatic and clear judgments, and learn more about how some good CTOs grow. The CTOs and COOs of Alibaba and Taobao are all born from web pages, step by step, writing line by line of code, not full of Large-scale, High-Performance, Distributed, UML, CMM, Architect, etc. A talented person who has written a few lines of code.
Of course, Alibaba and Taobao have a big shelf now. Among the current architects, there are many fake and influential. There is no sunshine in this world, and judgment is the most important.
The above are some video resources I collected, which helped me a lot in this process. If you don't want to experience the feeling that you can't find the information during self-study, no one answers your questions, and insists on giving up after a few days, you can join our deduction group [313782132], which has various software testing resources and technical discussions.
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