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

[Chad]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 4:47 PM, George Herbert<george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
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This is a very true point. To people not in the industry, there seems to be
little distinction between the two titles. And a lot of companies only have
a CIO or CTO, further leading people to believe there is no difference.

There is certainly more "tech" involved in a CTO. Clever of them to put
the word in there :)

-Chad