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holman / ama

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Thoughts about CTO / VP of Engineering role #450

Closed spajus closed 10 years ago

spajus commented 10 years ago

Hi Zach,

I'm wondering if GitHub has a CTO, and if it does, what are the responsibilities of this role in your organisation? Is it more managerial or technical (actually doing stuff)? What does a day of your CTO look like? Can it be done remotely? Is it something every tech company needs, or is it just a vanity title? Same goes with VP of Engineering.

What is your personal opinion on the subject?

holman commented 10 years ago

Actually, now that I think about it, I'm not sure we do. For awhile, Tom was our CTO, but when he was moved to CEO I think we just dropped that title. Scott is our CIO, which is possibly the closest analogy.

As you can tell by my answer, though, we don't really put much weight into titles. All of the founders (who effectively comprise our board) tend to make major decisions together, so there's not a lot of things that require specific realms of roles (with the exception of the CFO, Vlado, who we brought on board to handle specific financial considerations).

I think all titles are vanity titles until a certain point (maybe 75 employees or so). It's always funny watching startups get so focused on CEO this, CTO that, when they're five employees. None of that matters at that level.