jetsnoc

Nailed it. A commission structure is key when it comes to sales and a good one puts all of the right motivators in to all of the right places. It keeps them hungry, selling more, and they are motivated to structure deals and sell the product. Devs, the very best ones, don't want to punch a time clock either and they aren't a production line. We want to build good reliable products that are sold and ultimately used by clients. We too want our company to be competitive and to hit important goals and milestones to become bigger and stronger and compensation tools from management should reflect that. A good balance of 'Smart, Get things Done and Doesn't Jeopardize the entire business by building crap' must be handsomely rewarded and free beer doesn't cut it. It's hard to find those people, but, I know it's hard to find really good sales people too that are interested in selling aggressively, meeting goals but also building sustainable and fruitful relationships with clients instead of building a house of cards. I think startups nail this with the first few hires, they are incredibly critical to get right and they usually get a pretty good amount of stock.

Look me up, 575061. =)

This is a good strategy and one my teams are more closely moving towards. We're using Jenkins + Docker Swarm. If Jenkins receives a web hook that there is a new stable version tag, it builds the container, pushes it to the register and instructs the swarm to drain connections and do a rolling update of the container. In this regard, configuration management only becomes important for the swarm cluster nodes. E.g., managing our users and ssh keys and building up the nodes. We are using Terraform and Chef to create and manage our swarm cluster nodes and Jenkins+Docker swarm for everything else.

Amazon recently disabled acd-cli and rclone from accessing their services "for security reasons." I see that acd-cli is back while rclone remains effectively banned. Acd-cli and rclone truly had poor implementations. Though, the timing is suspicious for them not to allow rclone again if they implemented the service securely again.

My guess is that Amazon had more datahoarders than average-joe users and so the low-volume users didn't outweigh or pay for the heavy users like they originally estimated when they set the price for the service. It was good while it lasted.

I probably should have written that as Community Version. I'm very uninformed when it comes to all of this and the Docker, Inc. ecosystem. Sorry about that :)

I don't think your wrong. Someone being that entitled and ignorant must be the rare exception in 2017. Maybe I'm in a bubble too.

The conversation usually goes like this with my folk:

I get it, Moby is the OSS version and can be easily stood up and you don't see the need for extra cost. I'm glad you're trying to reduce expenses, but I don't mind paying for 24x7 Enterprise Support and it gives me piece of mind and priority escalation support.

Basically, I don't mind paying extra for a get out of jail free card if a whole swarm is offline.... I can tell the CEO we have the vendor partner engaged with a critical ticket and she can have piece of mind too. So, let's quote out the Enterprise version of Docker and evaluate the TCO of both solutions.

Of course, right tool for the job. I'm biased since most of our projects are heavy on crud forms and database entry. Accounting and loyalty space.

If you can get the time to develop the software to be similar with all of the benefits of a SPA, that is hard to ignore. Any recommendations on how to make this a reality?

Is anyone still developing multi-page architecture apps? Seems like you could still develop simple applications a multiple of times faster with Ruby on Rails or Django and sprinkle in Angular and/or AJAX Requests as needed. Surely that is still a thing. I know that a lot of you are all engineering for Netflix scale but developing two independent applications that speak to each other over an API spec sure has it's costs and is a drag on a small scrappy team wanting to iterate quickly.

I agree, this ain't just tech's problem.

IMHO, tech is a hostile environment with a lot of poor managers. I think the Peter principle applies to a lot of managers in tech. Promoted past their skill set. Just because someone is a good engineer does not mean they will be a good engineering manager. Managing humans with needs, concerns, ideals and life goals is so very different than managing a code-base. Executive leadership needs to consider this when building teams and figure out how to make and/or recruit good managers.

I would hazard a guess that a weak manager, manages all employees poorly. However, I would bet a lot of money that, like so many things in life, when you are bad in all quadrants on one thing, you'll likely be bad at other things like managing women. Realistically, they are the nearly the same to manage, but you can do some dumb things to make them feel excluded or make them feel like there is a boys club (probably because there is.)

Susan Fowler's team, for example, a bad manager thought it was a good idea to save costs by not purchasing leather jackets for women on the Uber DevOps team. Spare the few hundred or thousand dollars (even if it were in the thousands) and make your employees feel equal and like they are a part of the same tribe. It's common sense. Pocket change to Uber and it makes people feel comfortable around their coworkers, and they will enjoy being part of a team and being passionate about their work-unit, co-workers and take pride in their company.

Here's some anecdotal evidence. I had a product manager last week tell me she thought it was great that our company bought women's jackets for the team instead of making them wear bulky men's sizes like so many companies she has worked for in the past. That cost me less than $150 for them to set up the plates/screens/whatever with the printer but it bought me thousands to tens of thousands of dollars in good-will. Great investment. For me, this was a small gesture on my part and the companies behalf. But, it went a long way. The ladies on my teams are strong contributors, and it's table stakes for me to make sure they feel included and part of the team. Even if I have to tailor to them. Pun intended.

My direct management of every employee is a little bit different based on who they are, their communication style, how they receive feedback and their work-style. I assume that gender goes a little bit into how I interact with each person on my team and I am willing to admit I probably have some biases but overall if you're already managing your team with a high eq, you'll fare well and create an inclusive team.

Robot tax.

I would add (personal opinion of course):

  * the ability to communicate
  * play well with others
  * plan, schedule and estimate

Entirely a guess, presidential transition team?

If I could only buy three books, it would be:

  - Peopleware
  - Mythical Man Month
  - High output management

It is not, I will look into that. Maybe there are some synergies.

I've got your email from your blogs header. Will keep you in mind.

No, sorry! We're looking for CTOs that are working in the trenches with us to act as peer mentors and advisors.

Thank you for taking the time to post this. It's good advice from someone who is certainly our target audience.

A few answers/questions below:

* Bootstrapping with only a few names that are likely unrecognizable. I'm not the CTO of some random unicorn or vc-backed start-up. It's all the more reason I could use a peer-to-peer mentor. When I posted, there was only two of us who mutually agreed to it being a good idea. Myself? 4 years XP as a CTO and him 3 years 5 months. We started talking back and forth about small problems that plagued us or our teams. As we started helping each other, we realized there are likely many more like us who would benefit from having a peer to talk with.

* I am working on this now. Right now I am manually moderating the applications with only a name and email address to work from. Luckily, if you're a CTO/VP, you're name is pretty well published and indexed by LinkedIn, Google, etc. Lesson learned, if you build it they may come and you are likely going to be stuck with the repercussions of any decisions you hadn't made yet. I really should have asked for more on the form. At any rate, those that I cannot find easily I am replying back asking them to share more about themselves with me.

* Exactly right. At this time, it's a single email-list with a Q&A model and open discussion environment. You drive home a good point. Where I am a founding member and moderator, I need to clearly document our expectations, rules of the mailing list and a code of conduct as to what is appropriate to discuss and what is not. People do not want to be surprised when they are banned and a simple code of conduct can easily inform people and prevent them from posting something we don't want discussed or shared. Some of these may be legal minimums - for example, an anti-trust policy stating we cannot discuss pricing or fix the prices of our products especially where competitors may be on the same mailing list. I'm working on this now. As the group becomes larger, we likely need bylaws to further govern the organization.

* Great point regarding an explicit ban on advertising on the mailing list. That is definitely my intent.

Thank you again for taking the time to review and comment.

iyn,

Author here. Thanks! That's a great suggestion. As you can tell, right now the site and the mailing list is the most minimal of an implementation. We want to build a network, connect and mentor one another through the simplest and easiest mechanism possible - email. Once we have a medium-sized community with dozens of experts, we plan to add community managed content. Perhaps through a wiki?

I'll share the books and articles that have positively affected my career. These aren't tried and true and maybe dozens of people would disagree about their value but here they are, for what they are worth:

Management:

  - High output management (Grove, 1995)
  - Leading Up: How to Lead Your Boss So You Both Win (Useem)
  - It’s your Ship  (Abrashoff)
  - The score takes care of itself  (Walsh)
  - The Hard Thing About Hard Things  (Horowitz)
  - Where good ideas come from  (Johnson)
  - Extreme Ownership (Navy Seals) — (Willink)
  - Work Rules — (Bock)
  - 5 Dysfunctions of a team — (Lencioni)
  - Give and Take (Grant)
  - This is what impactful Engineering leadership looks like - http://firstround.com/review/this-is-what-impactful-engineering-leadership-looks-like/
  - Notes on startup engineering management for young bloods - http://www.elidedbranches.com/2015/10/notes-on-startup-engineering-management.html?m=1

Engineering:

  - Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk (Duval, Matyas, Glover, 2007)
  - Continuous Delivery: Release Software Releases through Build, Test and Deployment Automation (Humble, Farley, 2010)
  - Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, 2nd Edition (The XP Series) (Beck, Andres)
  - SICP: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
  - Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
  - Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
  - Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
  - Refactoring Databases - Evolutionary Database Design (Ambler, Sadalage, 2006)

I think this could be more useful if there was a local client that installs and proxies. E.g., A traditional query to localhost:53 gets translated to DNS-over-HTTPS.

KickBack Rewards Systems | Full Time | Remote (US primarily; will consider international for the right candidate.)

  KickBack Rewards Systems
  http://www.kickbacksystems.com
  http://careers.kickbacksystems.com

KickBack Rewards Systems is a privately held company that specializes in customer specific marketing and payments for over 3000 US clients. Our clients include a half-dozen Fortune 50 companies, one of them is an anchor partner in our national coalition loyalty program. All of that dribble means we have a market, a product fit and are now continually adding value and enhancing our platform.

As the CTO and Director of Software Development I need some help! You will be joining a medium sized department of 40 who all commit to their projects as a labor of love and their lives work. If you are interested in any of these positions my contact information is located under my profile. Our stack? C (embedded device), Python (RESTFul web services), AngularJS, D3, MySQL, Chef, Ansible and I am certain I am missing two dozen things.

I manage the engineering, devops, qa and product teams. That means I get to guide our culture and values through hiring the right people and by setting the standard. I also get to reinforce boundaries, protect the team's interests and ensure I'm facilitating an environment at KickBack that allows for a world-class engineering team. At KickBack you will be joining an open, transparent and honest environment. You'll be treated with respect and you won't be required to lower your standards. Yes, we're a for profit business so at times compromises need to be made but they are discussed, debated and the negatives are understood very well when we do so.

We're like any other company, we have technical debt but we strive for perfection in ourselves and in our software product as much as the free market and customers allow. At any rate, we think our approach to management and operating a software development business is a breath of fresh air. I need to fill the following roles:

  - Senior Frontend Developer 
  - Senior Python Developer
  - Senior Test Automation Developer
  - Quality Assurance Manager

If you're interested in applying or hearing more, please email me.

NOTE: KRS has a healthy intern program but we keep a very personal and 1:1 relationship with our interns.

Unfortunately, at this time I'm not able to take on any more interns but email me in six months once these roles are filled by exceptional candidates and my team leads and developers are ready to mentor future experts.

I recently had a very, very poor experience with them and their Managed AWS Cloud Services. I escalated and the sales rep stated "I'll share your feedback with leadership." Haven't heard another single word out of him. As you can imagine, their days as a vendor are numbered.

Thanks for the share, I will look into it. I wonder if their isn't as large of a demand for this type of support system in SF? Everyone seems very connected, has a VC network and may even have a seed-operated Alumni network and mailing list. I agree, they probably have their head down and are building their product. As they should. When they come up for air though they probably have a half-dozen mentors at their disposal. I'm not sure, that of course is all conjecture :)

Good article. As you get into the day-to-day work, I find that most things are far more meaty and have more depth than the examples here. I understand that the audience and length of this post surely couldn't "solve all the things."

However, it would be nice to have the management version of a rubber-duck, a pair, a mentor, a consultant or a life coach for people in our roles. I don't know if anyone else shares this opinion but I would be interested in a virtual meet-up where CTOs of startups and small businesses discuss best-practices and work through issues. It could be as simple as a mailing list. I suspect meetups and groups like this exist in-person but I live very far from the bay area and we're rural enough there simply is nothing nearby. If nothing like this exists, I would be willing to work and work hard with others to set it up. I think it would be so valuable to me that I wouldn't mind putting a lot of effort into getting it going.

I would also pay real money for the right mentor/CTO coach. Surely there are a number of passionate CTOs/Past CTOs that wouldn't mind passing on their legacy and mentoring me? If any of this at all sounds interesting, my email address is in my profile.

I cover my camera. For me though, it's not because I'm paranoid. I do understand that point of view though. I understand that rogue malware or espionage software could be installed on my workstation. However, if that were to happen the contents of the disk on my laptop provide much more value than the look on my face or the conversations I am having. Sure, I utilize full disk encryption but by that point I am logged into my system and the contents are accessible.

I cover my camera because almost all business conference software in 2016 turn the camera on by default. BlueJeans, GotoMeeting, etc. Sometimes I am just attending a meeting as a listening participant or talking with a client who honestly only dialed into the meeting. At any rate, I'm not very interested in showing my face by DEFAULT.

I would suspect that may be the case for Mark as well. TheGuardian's piece is a great fluff article (my opinion only) but I have to wonder if Occam's Razor applies here. He too may not want his face transmitted to a meeting by default?

I'm loving the 10Base2 in video #3 :) Those were some great times.

KickBack Rewards Systems | Full Time | Remote (US primarily; will consider international for the right candidate.)

  KickBack Rewards Systems
  http://www.kickbacksystems.com
  http://careers.kickbacksystems.com

KickBack Rewards Systems is a privately held company that specializes in customer specific marketing and payments for over 3000 US clients. Our clients include a half-dozen Fortune 50 companies, one of them is an anchor partner in our national coalition loyalty program. All of that dribble means we have a market, a product fit and are now continually adding value and enhancing our platform.

As the CTO and Director of Software Development I need some help! You will be joining a medium sized department of 40 who all commit to their projects as a labor of love and their lives work. If you are interested in any of these positions my contact information is located under my profile. Our stack? C (embedded device), Python (RESTFul web services), AngularJS, D3, MySQL, Chef, Ansible and I am certain I am missing two dozen things.

I manage the engineering, devops, qa and product teams. That means I get to guide our culture and values through hiring the right people and by setting the standard. I also get to reinforce boundaries, protect the team's interests and ensure I'm facilitating an environment at KickBack that allows for a world-class engineering team. At KickBack you will be joining an open, transparent and honest environment. You'll be treated with respect and you won't be required to lower your standards. Yes, we're a for profit business so at times compromises need to be made but they are discussed, debated and the negatives are understood very well when we do so. We're like any other company, we have some technical debt but we strive for perfection in ourselves and in our software product as much as the free market and customers allow. At any rate, we think our approach to management and operating a software development business is a breath of fresh air.

I need to fill the following roles:

  - Senior Frontend Developer 
  - Senior Python Developer
  - Senior Test Automation Developer
  - Product Owner

If you're interested in applying or hearing more, please email me.

NOTE: KRS has a healthy intern program but we keep a very personal and 1:1 relationship with our interns. Unfortunately, at this time I'm not able to take on any more interns but email me in six months once these roles are filled by exceptional candidates and my team leads and developers are ready to mentor future experts.

KickBack Rewards Systems | Full Time | Remote (US primarily; will consider international for the right candidate.)

  KickBack Rewards Systems
  http://www.kickbacksystems.com
  http://careers.kickbacksystems.com

KickBack Rewards Systems is a privately held company that specializes in customer specific marketing and payments for over 3000 US clients. Our clients include a half-dozen Fortune 50 companies, one of them is an anchor partner in our national coalition loyalty program. All of that dribble means we have a market, a product fit and are now continually adding value and enhancing our platform.

As the CTO and Director of Software Development I need some help! You will be joining a medium sized department of 40 who all commit to their projects as a labor of love and their lives work. If you are interested in any of these positions my contact information is located under my profile.

Our stack? C (embedded device), Python (RESTFul web services), AngularJS, D3, MySQL, Chef, Ansible and I am certain I am missing two dozen things.

I manage the engineering, devops, qa and product teams. That means I get to guide our culture and values through hiring the right people and by setting the standard. I also get to reinforce boundaries, protect the team's interests and ensure I'm facilitating an environment at KickBack that allows for a world-class engineering team. At KickBack you will be joining an open, transparent and honest environment. You'll be treated with respect and you won't be required to lower your standards. Yes, we're a for profit business so at times compromises need to be made but they are discussed, debated and the negatives are understood very well when we do so.

We're like any other company, we have some technical debt but we strive for perfection in ourselves and in our software product as much as the free market and customers allow. At any rate, we think our approach to management and operating a software development business is a breath of fresh air.

I need to fill the following roles:

  - Senior Frontend Developer 
  - Senior Python Developer
  - Senior Test Automation Developer
  - Product Owner

If you're interested in applying or hearing more, please email me.

NOTE: KRS has a healthy intern program but we keep a very personal and 1:1 relationship with our interns. Unfortunately, at this time I'm not able to take on any more interns but email me in six months once these roles are filled by exceptional candidates and my team leads and developers are ready to mentor future experts.