Just over a year and a half ago our Chief Technology Officer left the company to take a role within our parent company. Instead of rehiring a new CTO or having the technology teams report directly to the CEO, the decision was made to have the technology teams including development, cybersecurity and infrastructure report to me. While I had been involved with technology and software most of my career I had no technical background in development and those teams made up the vast majority of the group. Hey fake it till you make it right.
Not long after the change I decided that to better understand the day to day of the teams, to better serve the business and honestly in hopes of gaining a bit of respect from the team, I would take a full stack development course. My development leader looked at me like I had two heads when I asked him which one I should do, but laughingly threw out a few names and about a month later I was enrolled at Flatiron school.
It has not been easy…
I took the self led course online and working a job that generally requires more than 50 hours a week and a small business that I also run, the time commitment here was pretty daunting. Anyone who has worked in development knows you can’t just sit down for 15 minutes here or 30 minutes there and learn much. You might think, “ oh should be easy you can just ask your employees to do your homework”, but clearly that would have defeated the point and developers who already look at code all day and sometimes all night aren’t really excited about reviewing one of the executives weekend projects :)
I struggled allot, but here I am about year later and I’m about to turn in my final project for review. I’ve learned a ton and it has given me a new perspective on every aspect of the business that I manage and at the end of the day allot of it was actually fun. Not only has this garnered me a bit of respect from my team and also sr. executives across the company, but it has made me much much better at my job.
I do skip levels with business leaders and technologists on a regular basis and one theme I always impart is that in the near future business leaders who can’t do technology are going to be less and less valuable and technologists who can’t do business are going to be less and less valuable, so here’s to me putting my money where my mouth is and its been a great journey.
