This is extremely vindicating to read, since my interests have always been in using software to grow the business and not bragging about how complicated our technology stack is or how "clean" the invisible codebase is. Sometime during my 2019 job search, Alo S. was asking me clarifying questions on how I would describe my previous role and interests. I vividly remember being unable to give a coherent answer, before finally blurting out "I'm just a businessman who codes!" and immediately feeling guilty--maybe I shouldn't be in any kind of technology leadership role with that attitude?
With the benefit of more experience at a variety of startups, I now know I'm definitely happiest in organizations where the engineering department exists to support the business. Not the departments that serve as a vehicle to efficiently transfer VC dollars into engineering salaries continuously producing "solutions" that require ever-more dollars to maintain, with nary a thought as to whether any customer will be better served by yet another cloud ops team dedicated to replatforming the kubernetes deployment suite for the third time.
This is extremely vindicating to read, since my interests have always been in using software to grow the business and not bragging about how complicated our technology stack is or how "clean" the invisible codebase is. Sometime during my 2019 job search, Alo S. was asking me clarifying questions on how I would describe my previous role and interests. I vividly remember being unable to give a coherent answer, before finally blurting out "I'm just a businessman who codes!" and immediately feeling guilty--maybe I shouldn't be in any kind of technology leadership role with that attitude?
With the benefit of more experience at a variety of startups, I now know I'm definitely happiest in organizations where the engineering department exists to support the business. Not the departments that serve as a vehicle to efficiently transfer VC dollars into engineering salaries continuously producing "solutions" that require ever-more dollars to maintain, with nary a thought as to whether any customer will be better served by yet another cloud ops team dedicated to replatforming the kubernetes deployment suite for the third time.
Love it Eric. Do you have financial savvy?