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

[George Herbert]

On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 5:57 PM, Brion Vibber<brion at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 8/7/09 5:43 PM, George Herbert wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Oh yes, this is already very much an ongoing process as we've been
> increasing the ops staff this last year.


One addition that popped up in my head overnight.

You've been describing the role as CTO, but I think in US IT industry
standard naming schemes it's really more of a CIO role.

CTO tends to be associated with development (hardware/software), the
sort of role I understand Brion will be still handling going forwards.

CIO is more of the IT operations manager, both for inwards and
outwards facing environments.  Large websites sometimes have CTO for
outwards facing IT environments, but with a breakdown of IT vs
development I think the standard industry naming may make more sense.

I understood what you had in mind from the first email, but I think a
typical IT candidate seeing CTO would think something very different
at first, and the label and first impression can make a big difference
in who you can find and how they approach the role.


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