[Foundation-l] Upcoming tech hiring: CTO position split

[George Herbert]

On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 3:42 PM, Brion Vibber<brion at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 8/7/09 3:39 PM, James Forrester wrote:
>> 2009/8/7 Brion Vibber<brion at wikimedia.org>:
>>> On 8/7/09 3:06 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
>>>> It's not just about resumes, it's also about being taken seriously
>>>> when communicating with others. A "Head Software Architect" will
>>>> probably be taken more seriously than a "Senior Software Architect",
>>>> since the former shows you are the boss, that latter could be one of
>>>> many.
>>>
>>> Having many folks at that level is be a condition dearly to be wished for!
>>
>> Well, in my experience it shows that the organisation's overall
>> architecture is poorly thought-out, and with insufficient resource
>> expenditure on correcting it (or, for that matter, stopping the rot
>> getting even worse). But yes. :-)
>
> Well ideally it would be because we really do have that much work to
> do... ;)
>
> -- brion

My eleven cents -

My consulting company gets brought in a lot to deal with this type of
growth in commercial companies (few have this big a web presence, but
operations concepts are operations concepts).

Titles are important to some people (above in senior leadership, at
level where people are sensitive about their title, below where line
staff sometimes behave differently depending on management titles).
Some people not so much.  Either way works, but it does matter to know
your own staff, leadership, and candidates mindsets.

Separating out development lead role (engineering) from operations
lead role is an important step.  Second, and not too far behind, is
usually separating out internal IT from web-facing operations - two
very different environments and sets of customer expectations, and
usually best served by different people and team leads.

A good CTO / operations candidate will be able to look at the way WMF
is operating those teams now and try to suggest paths forwards for
those two functional roles etc.

I believe some internal staff are focusing on office IT now, and a lot
of the website operations people are volunteer.

I suspect you're going to have to be prepared to do a lot of internal
discovery and discovery with potential hires to show them the web ops
side - it's not well documented now (I keep meaning to find out more
about the ops team and finding I have no time to join the IRC channel
24x7 ;-P ).  The team seems to function well - servers seem decently
stable - but it's not clear to me if the process and documentation is
up to industry standards for large website operations.  At some point
tribal knowledge has to yield to documentation and process and
organizational knowledge.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com