The benefits of being a CTEO
Ignite Week 4
I wrote this post because everyone is always going on about learning to code, but we need some normal people left in the world.
I have the pleasure and pain of being a CTO and CEO. At times, it is incredibly frustrating as it means I cannot focus down on one. But at other times, it is incredibly insightful as it means I get to hang out with the other (real) CTOs on the cohort and pretend to be a techie part time. In reality I’m not really a CTO, I’m a CEO that happens to be able to code and haven’t found someone to pick up the slack of CTO. But, not being a ‘proper’ techie does come with some perks. For the non-techies reading this, you have many advantages and insights that your techie counter parts just don’t have.
Not a code groupie
Every serious developer I have come across has strong, extremely strong, thoughts on what frameworks or languages should or should not be used. For every person that sets up a site on Wordpress, there are probably 10 devs who are crying in the corner and wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole. For every person who uses rails to get their product out, there is a techie who will just call it whimsical magic. The benefits of being a non-techie is frankly you don’t come with that baggage.
You just care about getting sh*t out
You aren’t there to massage your developer ego, which is definitely a thing. You are just there to figure out what is the quickest way I can get this out. If wordpress or squarespace is the answer, let’s go. You don’t have the time (or let’s face it, knowledge) to antagonise over frameworks, APIs and languages.
You have no constraints
Technology allows us to break boundaries and do things that we didn’t think would be possible say 5 years ago. But having an insanely tech focus can mean that you actually put constraints on what you think you can or cannot achieve. My co-founder is a total non-techie, she googles ‘how to screen shot on a mac’ and doesn’t care for being a techie. But it is amazing. She has no limitations.
Because she will come to me and say imagine if we could (insert big time ambition that she thinks can be done with a line of code).
In my head, I am thinking about how the heck do we build that, but in her head, she is just thinking we can defo do this. Call it blissfully ignorant or thinking with no constraints but it is definitely a good thing to have. And in most cases there is something out there that will allow you to implement what you want, or at least, the nearest thing to it.
You don’t get blinded
Build, iterate, fix bugs. It is very easy as a techie to feel like you are working hard on meaningful stuff. You built a new feature, you fixed a bug, you cleaned up your code. But the truth of the matter is none of these matter if you aren’t thinking about your end user. You can build all you want and pretend you are working hard but if you aren’t talking to your end users or having some form of conversation outside you and your terminal, you are building for no one.
Again this is where my sister can be totally unbias and not hide away in code.
Big shout out to Adam Farah who is helping me become a better coder one commit at a time.
