• ray10k (unregistered)

    So, TRWTF is that the Chief Technologcial Officer knows so little about what he's talking about, that he doesn't even notice when people just say that they're following orders while ignoring them? <obligatory>Sounds like regular management, not a WTF</obligatory>

    Still, nice article. An enjoyable read.

  • (nodebb)

    The real stupid part is that the CTO said Angular and typescript are old when Google not only created them but also use them.

    But yes the real WTF would be a technical executive that has no clue what technology actually is apparently and decides Midway through a project we are going to redo everything. Although I suppose ironpython is still technically supported so they could have ended up using that somewhere and then claim it's using python

    Addendum 2016-11-22 06:54: Created angular I mean.

  • Peter (unregistered)

    So, to summarize:

    TRWTF is C-level management.

    Some things never change.

  • LCrawford (unregistered)

    "Python is new" - since 1991 when it was introduced?

  • (nodebb)

    Buzzword compliance at its finest. Props to Brittany for making the most efficient implementation ever of buzzword compliance.

  • stringstring (unregistered)

    I once worked for a company where the incoming, very-well-paid, non-technical 'CTO' walked in to the dev room on his first day, heard us discussing a complexity around our CMS (an open-source Ruby one, all our tech was Ruby and C#), and his first words to the entire team were, "Have you considered switching to Drupal?"

    Things went downhill from there.

  • UnholySheep (unregistered)

    “but with 1 hour of research, I can disagree with it." Is that all a CTO needs to say to disagree with an analysis? And here I thought you need to provide actual (objectiv) arguments:

  • Don (unregistered) in reply to DocMonster

    This is not uncommon. The hilarious thing is that any given spec for a tech executive - Director, VP, C-level - requires a background in, well, tech.

  • Gargravarr (unregistered) in reply to LCrawford

    Especially considering C# was created in 2004, so they were already using the newer technology :)

    C-levels. Always the same. An entertaining article, nonetheless.

  • Andrew (unregistered)

    "...he read that Google used Python, and so Initech also needed to use Python."

    So Initech also makes a search engine and phone OS that most of the world uses? Google also uses almost every technology ever created, chump.

    https://www.google.com/humans.txt

  • Balu (unregistered)

    As Python(s) would have put it: "Every SPERM... - erm, sorry for that! Every SMERP is sacred..."

  • chris (unregistered)

    Do you guys really expect a CTO that knows programming? Possibly in a small startup, but in any larger company, a CTO is in the best case someone with an engineering background but at least 10 years removed from any real work. In the usual case, it is some sales person with no technical knowledge. Anyhow, fun story

  • Chronomium (unregistered)

    <!- [...] And it just, JUST dawned on me that the video game character was named after the vacuum cleaner. ->

    Well there's debate between whether it's that or the lawyer that won Nintendo the lawsuit from Universal Studios over "Donkey Kong" vs "King Kong".

    But aside from sucking, this CTO is just like Kirby in other ways - on the course of his adventure he wrecks everything in his path and has a fair chance of accidentally unleashing a Lovecraftian horror upon his world just because his cake got stolen.

  • Wonkothesane (unregistered) in reply to DocMonster

    Google created typescript?

    News to me... I suspect it will be news to Microsoft as well.

    Ill let you have a google and figure out why :)

  • Volker (unregistered)

    Reminds me of http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-17 ...

  • George Gonzalez (unregistered)

    The CTO at my last startup was all hot about using Python, for rather unPythonesque super huge data operations. He was amazed that when he tried to sell the software product, nobody bought it when he told them that you needed to hire three instances of 280 Amazon number-crunching blades running our Python software to (very slowly) handle a modest data flow. My suggestions of how to pre-process the data fell on very deaf ears. The place folded soon after.

  • (nodebb) in reply to UnholySheep

    “but with 1 hour of research, I can disagree with it." Is that all a CTO needs to say to disagree with an analysis? And here I thought you need to provide actual (objectiv) arguments: When you're the highest IT position in the organization, you don't need anything other than "because I said so". People tend to ignore the fact you typically present arguments when the implication is that if they disagree with your disagreement, they'll be fired.

    Google created typescript? News to me... I suspect it will be news to Microsoft as well. Ill let you have a google and figure out why :)

    Did you miss where I added the addendum saying I meant they created Angular? ;) NodeBB Is the real WTF since "edit" is really "append to". Even the original garbage software let you actually edit what you said for like 10 minutes.

    Addendum 2016-11-22 10:05: This forum software is straight trash :)

  • D-Coder (unregistered)

    From: Kirby McCloy [email protected]

    I just had a sudden hit of curiosity and... initech.com does exist.

  • Remy Porter (google) in reply to D-Coder

    A real company called Initech. What's this world coming to?

  • Kashim (unregistered) in reply to chris

    Whether or not the CTO has a degree in [x]engineering, if he is actually a Chief TECHNICAL Officer, then he should at least have some technical background. In the same way that you wouldn't walk into a carpenter's shop and tell them to make everything out of fiberglass because it's newer technology, you don't tell a pile of C# developers to suddenly go learn and switch to Python. Throw metaphors at him until he understands why what he's asking of you is stupid. Sports metaphors are best.

    "You don't take the Cubs, throw them in pads, and make them play football because it's newer. They make money the way that they know how, and it would take years for them to become proficient in a different professional sport."

    "A programming language isn't like a baseball bat, where you switch to the newest and best whenever you can. It is like the stadium, it contains all of the tools for the entire game, and switching to a new one is not usually the best move."

    Also, if the CTO cares so little for a project that he just breezes through a meeting 2 hours late, then I will happily tell him I used python after writing a small inane script that does basically nothing but move data around inside the application while C# does the core work. If he asks to see the python, I will show him the python. He won't ask what the python does, because he thinks he already knows.

  • The Gray Lensman (unregistered)

    In 14 years at my previous workplace, I lost count of the instances where our dev group feigned agreement with our horribly ill-informed PHB, then proceeded to ignore all of his guidance and do it the correct way. BTW - The PHB was a former grocery store manager, with a business management degree, coupled with the 'ole "Certified Project Manager" certificate, so of course all day to day work became one of his "projects". All these comments about CTOs needing some sort of actual experience in the "Tech" portion of their job title is just silly talk.

  • Remy Porter (google) in reply to The Gray Lensman

    Personally, while I think it's always beneficial to understand the subject you're managing, a non-technical manager can still be a great manager on technical projects- if they're willing to defer to the experts. That's why we HAVE experts.

  • Peter (unregistered)

    You might suppose that the CTO's job is to provide strategic technical direction to those below him.

    You might be correct, but in many cases, he's a buddy of the CEO who needs a job and has an impressive resume. When this company eventually crashes and burns, he'll blame someone else and move on.

    "F*** up and move up", as my old boss once said.

  • Alex Vincent (unregistered)

    "How many times do I have to tell you, the right tool for the right job!"

    -- Montgomery Scott, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

    (Probably the best part of that film.)

  • (nodebb) in reply to Remy Porter

    Personally, while I think it's always beneficial to understand the subject you're managing, a non-technical manager can still be a great manager on technical projects- if they're willing to defer to the experts. That's why we HAVE experts.

    Yeah... I've yet to see that. Management always seems to think that they are the experts, no matter the subject. After all, that's why they're management and you're just a peon, what could you possibly know? Everything important is already decided, you're just the grunt who needs to make it a reality.

  • Jeff Olson (unregistered)

    Good article; my only question is, who is Chris? It's not really clear, since he was never properly introduced...

  • MP (unregistered)

    Uh, Angular2 had its final release only 2 months ago. It's dramatically difference from classic angular, and they made breaking changes in the router in the RC phase.

    Were the technologies changed in the story for some reason?

  • Brendo (unregistered)

    TRWTF is not understanding you can use angular with python the same way you can with C#

  • Congraubullations Josh (unregistered)

    I worked at a company where we implemented a Java Struts application and had application server and database issues. The company had just moved from ASP.net and there was a manager who was very anti-Java. He convinced the QA team that the problem with the system was that it was written in Java. It wasn't. It was the database procedures that the same manager had convinced the DBA to jack up. QA told upper management it was a Java issue, when they, having no coding experience, had any idea what they were even talking about. We worked behind the DBA's back and fixed his procedures and the server issues, but QA was convinced we had a problem.

    So we swapped out the Struts ".do" with ".asp" and redeployed and sent it to QA saying we did parallel work in ASP. The project was passed without incident.

  • Jeremy Hannon (google)

    A Python project without a line of Python. Sounds like a project I was brought on as a temp to finish - a simple Crystal Reports project that didn't use a single Crystal Reports and instead it used ASP.NET WebForms and C#. Fortunately for them, this temp knew how to code in that as well - I can only imagine what a different developer would have done.

  • eric bloedow (unregistered)

    reminds me of a DIlbert cartoon: the PHB says, "i have a great idea!" (Wally and Dillbert both think, UH-OH) i think the PHB said, "why don't we run our inventory over our e-mail system?" ( i can't actually remember that part, but is was complete nonsense anyway) Dilbert and Wally both think: -fact: that is the dumbest idea in the history of the universe. -fact: his comprehension is so limited that debate is futile. -fact: we could spend hours unsuccessfully explaining why it's a bad idea. -fact: he would never know if we used his idea or not. "no problem." "we'll get right on it."

  • emurphy (unregistered)

    The "inventory over e-mail" strip: http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-12-31

  • Vlad Patryshev (unregistered)

    As someone who spent time at Google rewriting horrible Python spaghetti app into a (relatively) beautiful Java, I am sure I know what that idiot was talking about. Python was a prototyping language in the early days of Google; the guys just a) did not know other languages, and b) did not care to learn something; Python is ok for prototyping. It's not ok for anything else. Well, Quora is still in Python, but Coursera - not anymore, it's in Scala now.

    But amazing how idiots manage to take over the discourse. They go play golf or watch the game with their equally dumb buddies, and share rumors about typescript, python, scala, java, c#, and the professionals then have to listen to all this bs. Sad, of course. Sad.

  • Derpface (unregistered) in reply to DocMonster

    I actually got pretty proficient at educating managers on what their job was, and what my job was while I was empoyed. I had I think 7 different managers over at time span of 5 years, and only ever had problems with one of them. Who for some inane reason tried to play the politics game with me, and got his ass so fucking burned he left me alone after that. (Just because I opt out of the politics crapfest doesn't mean I am not a mean player when forced to. )

    The trick is to explain to them that you are hired as an expert at what you do, and that you are entirely open to making them look good by letting them steal all the thunder. Everyone that matters will know who's doing all the work behind the curtains anyway. That way, they seem to get off your back, and will gladly do their job (which I see as nothing more than a resource for me to hand over any dealings with red tape).

    I've since moved on to be a HPC, which for some odd reason is automatically giving me the expert advantage and managers fall over themselves to accomodate my opinions on things. Even if I know fuck all about whatever it is they are asking about. If I told them to go jump off a technological cliff, they'd do it.

  • Joseph Osako (google) in reply to UnholySheep

    IME, the CTO doesn't have to give any reason at all. He calls the shots, and if he says to write web pages in assembly language and serve them from a network-ready television you'd better be ready to... uh, say you did it that way regardless of what you actually did.

    But then, I was the one whose boss announced that we would be following Microsoft's "best practices" by shipping untested code and not telling the customers about it. The same one who hired my friend Sophie on the basis of her knowing how to right-click on a background image and select 'Save Image'. No kidding. But, as the DWTF article on that said, he had an almost endless supply of capital coming from his family (so long as it kept him and his even-less-competent-if-you-can-believe-it younger brother out of the eldest brother's far more solvent business interests), so why would he care?

  • Mathijs (unregistered) in reply to DocMonster

    Is this like a very american thing? I've yet to see an CTO which didn't grow from being a developer, or still is one.

  • Zenith (unregistered)

    Probably. I've only ever had three bosses who could do any kind of development. When one of them retired while I was still working there, though, management ran right out and got somebody with zero development experience who could barely even turn a computer on. I really try not to get jaded but the industry as a whole, from my point of view, is held back by unskilled leadership making poor decisions ad infinitum. I don't know what to do about it because the choice before me always looks like "stay a programmer and be managed by idiots" or "move out of programming and have to manage idiots." Why can't I just get paid well to run rings around everyone else?

  • Not frist (unregistered)

    Lsat

  • eric bloedow (unregistered)

    i just remembered another story: a manager insisted on having a brand new computer-even though everyone in IT knew that he NEVER used the one he had. so they gave him a new-looking computer made up ENTIRELY of BROKEN components! non-functional cpu,memory,monitor,mouse,keyboard,not even the power button worked...and he NEVER NOTICED, he just kept boasting about how good his computer was!

  • Shayne. (unregistered) in reply to Remy Porter

    Yep to previous comment about non-tech managers are fine if they know to defer. In fact the best managers I've had have been non-technical. Guys that know just enough to tell me what they want ( "I need a screen where I can search for widgets, open them and then send them to a printer") and then f** off out the way and let me implement it in the best way I know how without getting molested by management troglodytes.

  • ilikepython (unregistered)

    Python is there to fill the gaps python does small things, with fast production cycles, python is mainly easy to write and read, its gread for getting a modified echo server running within 10 minutes or accessing some restful api or parsing data and crunching it through numpy into little graphs or other datafiles ... but python has no inherent benefits for being switched to ... also it doesnt really run in browsers xD

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