- Leadership in Tech
- Posts
- From Software Engineer to CTO
From Software Engineer to CTO
#20 – January 18, 2021
this week's favorite
It starts as an obsession. You play with your first coding language, and you’re hooked. You keep learning new languages and building cool things with your new skills. You’re doing this in an exciting environment with enthusiastic mentors who support you.
The journey has been tough but deeply rewarding for me. There were occasions when I thought the leadership role was not for me and I should go back to being an individual contributor. But, with support from my organization and learning (books, blogs, observation), I have started to enjoy the role and its challenges.
Recently, I celebrated my seven year anniversary of originally starting at Xero, and it got me thinking about what we’ve achieved in that time. Scaling from a startup to a global tech company in the space of 14 years means we’ve had to respond to an incredible amount of growth and change, from our customers and teams to our ways of working.
Here are some of the top things I’ve learned throughout my years both as an interviewer at Asana and Google, and as a hiring manager at Asana.
New technologies enable activities that fall into one of two categories: 1) doing things you could already do but can now do better because they are faster, cheaper, easier, higher quality, etc. 2) doing brand new things that you simply couldn’t do before. Early in the development of new technologies, the first category tends to get more attention, but it’s the second that ends up having more impact on the world.