- I started 9 months ago for a company building battery management systems.
- The company is one year overdue delivery, customer is overly patient.
- 3 developers quit one year ago due to dysfunctional leadership (I learned).
- 14 days after I start, old CTO quit because of long-covid health problems.
- 14 days after that, new CTO joins.
- Other devs are introvert and communicate little (no docs, no comments, empty commit messages)
- "I can fix this!" -- CI, testing, linting, issue management, strategy: I'm de-facto software lead
- First 3 months, new CTO stays mostly in background, mostly focuses on low-level hardware problems
- Gradually, CTO starts disturbing developers now operating at 30-40% capacity on their main tasks
- I present statistics to CEO and CTO and over 3 weeks, CTO stops bugging developers as much
For the past few weeks he's been working from home on "future design documents". I showed him "ADRs" (architectural decision records) but I made them live in the issue tracker instead of in git to minimize the effort of cleaning it up afterwards.
I've told him kindly that what we're making is principally equivalent to his vision, but he needs to let software people design the actual interfaces and implementations. I've tried to say what he's doing is premature generalisation: Instead of making overly generalised software interfaces over hardware ("A battery is like an inverter in that they are both POWER UNITS!" (I'm not kidding.)), he should find out how to make the actual hardware work. I've been bold and told him: His current work is a waste of time. I even resorted to bullying by tagging all non-sensical ADRs with "POWER UNITS", and ended up apologising.
Recently, he started drive-by commenting the issue tracker, closing random issues because "fixing this is not worth pursuing right now" instead of reordering an infinite backlog. He started creating a bunch of "projects" with unrealistic or no timelines. He remembers details wrong. He remembers problems as solved when they're not. He lies to our customer to downplay the product's state, and it's shown at least a dozen times.
He repeatedly tries to book developers to listen to his ideas for hours, but nobody is buying into it.
Having been booked for a two hour meeting with the most senior architect guy, I asked him how he copes, and he told me he's been just as bold with how stupid this is, and our CTO brushed this off as well.
Time spent with him feels like lost time: He can't provide details, and he can't contain them either.
He strong-armed that I could run Linux in spite of policy.
And he fixed real hardware problems in the beginning.
He's a nice, awkward guy; I like him personally, but he is worse than useless to me as a boss.
Lately I've applied for similar jobs with a clear "Lead" in the title.
I really like this job. I like coding Rust, having an impact, growing my leadership skills, the commute, the simplicity of a small place, the potential to grow production, and the vastness of scaling operations here.
But I can't accept this obstruction, and I don't know how to be nice or constructive about it.
I want to find an alternative job and wave this in front of my leaders and tell them I'm neglecting more salary and less stress, and I don't see the upside.
I can't ask my CTO to quit or I will. I've been hoping he would quit for 6 months, but it's just got worse.
What should I do?
Sorry for ranting.
I mean, you can try to get them fired or get them to quit, but it's not very professional and you're more likely to get fired than fix the actual problem.
In general, folks don't get to CTO status for no reason. They typically get there because they generated results. Even a small start-up CTO secured funding and built a POC, and certainly a mid- to large-sized company's CTO is going to be extremely effective, regardless of how good they are at their job.
You can take the other advice and try to be stoic. Put all of your efforts and passion into non-work activity, coast, and do the least amount of work possible at your day job. That's totally a valid thing.
If you're like me, that sounds like a personal version of hell. I'd rather find another job wherein I can be excited, rather than dreading dealing with my boss every day/week.
So unfortunately I think your best shot is to just keep looking around and find something else that's a better fit.
Your CTO seems like technically knowledgeable. He's trying to be hands-on. These 2-hour meetings to listen to "his ideas" could just be him trying to communicate better because he obviously sees you're not on the same page. You should cherish these meetings, not push back.
For any new leader, existing coworkers that are constantly pushing back is just the worst. If you think you can't change your mindset to be more cooperative and empathetic with your boss, it might be better to quit.
Finally, would you like to be the CTO of this company if given the opportunity today?
That is to say, I focus on what I can change or improve and let someone else deal with the rest. I've put too much energy in the past on things I can't change, broken processes that everyone else is completely OK with, lack of testing/CI, horrible leadership teams, bad architectural decisions. If I can change any of those things I do, but a lot of time it's political and really difficult, you often have to "boil the frog slowly."
I also try to squeeze the absolute most I can out of the job to advance my career. Any chance I can to gain a new skill or improve existing ones, or just work on something interesting, that's what I'll do.
Four months of unemployment later, I was almost bankrupt, but it was still absolutely the right decision to have made. My mental health would not have survived much longer.
Now I'm in a much lower paying part-time job at a smaller company, but with a wonderful team that is passionate about what they do and supportive of each other. We're very user-focused and not C-suite ego driven, and it makes all the difference in the world. Tons of consumer interactions, minimal bureaucracy, no overbearing stupidity from on high. It's a night and day cultural difference from my last job, which was cushy but joyless. I'm really happy in this new setup (gotta get more hours soon though, lol).
Life's full of tradeoffs. I could've easily coasted, but I signed up to make a difference, not check boxes. I made the decision to quit, it hasn't been easy, but it was absolutely the right call and things are getting better every day. I'm actually excited about work again.
Side note, you mentioned batteries and inverters? My last job was with a mid sized solar manufacturer Who frankly wasn't that experienced with tech work and tried to clobber together an ecosystem from different small acquihires. It... was messy, to say the least. I've never worked for a more inefficient company, in terms of bureaucratic nonsense and worthless planning. Maybe it comes with the territory (old school manufacturing vs modern software companies)?
But I just always had a strong sense that life is too short to be spent on aggravation from people who stop mattering the instant you leave a job.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/christmas/2023/11/15/what-i-know...