🔗 What a CTO should know about tech

This article was very kindly sponsored by Hermit Tech, who sent me some money so that I could have a month or two to look after my mental health and write a few posts that would be useful to them without stressing too much. They are very capable data engineers (and other kinds of engineers too, but as I understand it, they mostly focus on data), and both wise and good people besides that. If you have pressing needs in the data space, I unreservedly recommend them to you.

Much discussion has been dedicated over the last few decades to discussions of whether technical leaders (CTOs, CDOs and all that kind of executive crowd) need to be "technical" or not to hold the position. Now, from the get-go, I don't think this framing is particularly useful: after all, being "technical" or not is more about gender than anything, and it's just not a useful delineation. However, it seems fairer to discuss whether CTOs need technical knowledge at all or not, and if so, what kind of technical knowledge they need.

As to the question of how much and what technical knowledge might be desired in a leader of a technical field, I think we could do worse than look to military theory. Personally, I think that military theory, being the theory of organising and co-ordinating large groups of people towards a common end, has quite wide application in the societies we live in, but I know that I have to argue that directly. It is, however, inarguable that the military involves leadership of people with specific technical skills on a wide scale, often by people who do not themselves have those skills, and we could thus probably stand to learn from that.

My intention is, over the course of a few articles, to discuss what about technology a technical leader does or doesn't need to know, using Clausewitz and Jomini's writings on military theory as a framing device to discuss the nature of leadership in a field where expertise is of vital importance. There is much, in this framing, to be discussed, but in this case, I wish to discuss one of the more straightforward bodies of knowledge that a CTO might be able to acquire: that of understanding facts about the capabilities of teams and technologies. If you learn nothing else about strategy, tactics or operations, simply having this knowledge will go a long way towards making you more effective as a leader of a technical team.