How much of the T in CTO?
Episode 4 of my CTO series, about why I still go to Gophercon
· find previous episodes: -1-, -2- and -3-.
For the third year in a row, I attended Gophercon EU, an event with two full days of talks about the Go language, Berlin edition. This year for the first time, I didn’t attend as a software engineer and full time Go developer, but as the CTO of a team of 10 people who happen to write more Go than I do. Why am I still going?
Why attend a conference?
As a developer, I would come out of such an event full of ideas, side projects that would never lead anywhere (I’m a mum), good practices for memory optimisation and coffee-machine debate topics for my teammates. Should we be using the standard library for this specific task? Did you see that the next version would be including this feature? Have you read this person’s book about command-line interfaces in Go? Do you own an Arduino and will you build a thing for your house?
In my current position, I spend less than 20% of my time writing code, and it’s usually proof of concepts or throw-away scripts, so memory optimisation is not something I can apply on my code as soon as I get home. So what do I get from 2 days of talking tech?
The talks themselves
Well, for a start, I do not spend enough time talking tech in my job. I have long conversations about priorities and workload, about people, business partners, processes and data security. Having a clever person explaining how they spent 3 months tracing CPU usage is the kind of moment that reminds me why I love tech in the first place. It’s exciting. It’s worth dedicating long hours to tricky problems, toiling through the screams and frustration, and, maybe, reaching a solution. It’s fun and rewarding. Most of the time.
Second, there are numerous good practices that I know my team could benefit from. I have notes for each person in my team and I will be sharing links as soon as the recordings and presentations get out.
The socialising
Chatting with people outside of the talks, with a cold Rhabarberschorle in hand and a drop of sun in the Biergarten, was not for me a way to recruit as some would have expected. It is an excellent way to understand how people work in other companies, what engineering practices they have in place, what works for them and what does not.
I could expose my problems in a safe environment, something that my position does not allow me to do at work. This is a big difference between CTO and dev: I don’t have a team of equals to support me, I’m the manager and the fine line of legitimacy is hard to walk. An external event is perfect to ask for ideas from other professionals.
A few examples:
- What is your recruitment process? What have you been through as a candidate and what did you like? What made you run away?
- How do you deal with tech debt? (Don’t ask this if you’re in a hurry, people can be very passionate about debt)
- If you had 2 days to fix whatever you wanted in your code base, would you know where to start? Would you need preparation to make it fit into 2 days? Yes, I want to use my team members’ excellent ideas, because they know everything that is wrong, they just need time to fix it.
What I missed
Finally, there is one subject that I missed. Funnily enough, it is the one subject that we get too much of when conferences are targeted at gender diversity.
I guess that 95% of the attendees are employees, are part of a team, and have to deal with a manager. There is a people aspect that would be worth a lightning talk.
I attended a few “women in tech” events in my time, and the conclusion is: not worth the effort. Women are not invited in these events to talk about tech, only about diversity and what it is like to be the only one in the room. I already know that! See my rant from last year.
On the contrary, in this case, facing a floor of mostly white men, the occasion would be perfect to make these people aware that not everybody is like them and this is what you, as the majority, can do to make the minority welcome.
As this seems to be my conclusion to a lot of subjects, I will conclude by advising anyone working in tech to attend at least one good conference per year, to open their perspective to what’s out there technically, humanly, project-wise, and see how inspiring people can be when they get passionate.
Also, Berlin is so nice in June.
