Intern to CTO
Sibelius Seraphini
From Intern Developer to CTO
Overview
- Individual Contributor
- Manager
- Intern/Junior
- Senior
- Staff archetypes
- CTO
Individual Contributor - IC
- contribute to code
- writing documentation
- writing tests
- writing RFC
- focus on a single project
- fix bugs, make improvements, build features
Manager
- lead a team
- lead a project/product
- do hiring
- do 1:1s
- communication and collaboration
- more high-level technical contributions
- database modeling and architecture
Intern/Junior
- they can be an Individual Contributor
- they can't handle uncertainty
- they can work on small tasks
- they need step-by-step description of what needs to be done
- they need help and mentoring
Senior
- they can be an Individual Contributor or a Manager
- they can handle uncertainty
- they can work on big tasks and projects
- they can work with little supervision
- they mentor juniors developers
- they can lead a team
- they can lead a project/product
Staff Engineers and CTOs
There are many different types of staff engineers and CTOs
Staff archetypes
- Team Lead
- Architect
- Solver
- Right Hand
Team Lead
- lead a team/squad
- they can scope complex tasks
- they can coordinate their team toward solving a problem
- they can unblock the team
Architect
- write a great Request for Comments (RFC)
- they can do the Domain Driven Design
- they can be a bottleneck
Solver
- they can fix any problem that comes up
- transient position
Right Hand
- only work on the most important problems
- a mix of business, technology, people, culture, and process.
From Intern To CTO
- from Individual Contributor to Manager
From Intern To CTO
- from Operational Work to Strategic Work
From Intern To CTO
- from One Task to Many Tasks
From Intern To CTO
- from Doing to Delegating
From Intern To CTO
- from Following Decisions to Making Decisions
From Intern To CTO
- from Detail to TL;DR (Resume)
From Intern To CTO
- from Short Term to Long Term
From Intern To CTO
- from Coding to Planning
From Intern To CTO
- from Depth to Breadth
From Intern To CTO
- from Hard Skills to Soft Skills
From Intern To CTO
- from Local Scope to Global Impact
From Intern To CTO
- from Specialist to Generalist
Sibelius Path to CTO (PontoTel)
- intern at PontoTel on 2015
- hired to build a voice recognition system
- learned fast backend (python) and frontend (angular)
- learned about startups, business, and product
Sibelius Path to CTO (PontoTel)
- increase in ownership and responsibility for the project
- coding more than everybody
- solved faster any bug that happened in production
- proactivity to bring solutions to existing problems
Sibelius Path to CTO (PontoTel -> Entria)
- built React SP Community
- many international freelancers in different projects to get experience faster
- become CoFounder of Entria with Rafael Turk
Sibelius Path to CTO (Entria)
- Autonomy to make decisions and solve problems
Who makes the decision is the one that learns from it
Sibelius Path to CTO (Entria)
- built BrandLovers
- manage many projects at Natura (for more than 1 million users)
- hired many developers
Sibelius Path to CTO (Entria)
- also managed Gol App project (for more than 1 million users)
- manage and mentor teams
- improve the process to make us move faster
- solved many bugs
- solved many production incidents
Sibelius Path to CTO (Entria/Feedback House)
- start Feedback House own SaaS product
- migrate incrementally from Software House to SaaS business model
Sibelius Path to CTO (Woovi)
- start OpenPix/Woovi product
- many features and products in this product
- decouple backends and frontends to scale
- separate teams in squads to scale
Sibelius Path to CTO (Woovi)
- scaling OpenPix/Woovi tech, process, and other sectors.
- building the factory to build products
- solving the problem of the problem (root cause)
- bringing innovation to payments
Sibelius Path to CTO (Community)
- 17k members on React Brazil Community
- 1k members on private community discord
- mentorship for developers to level up
- consulting for startups: before MVP until they reach PMF
Sibelius Path to CTO
- I'm still learning a lot every single day!
Conclusion
- becoming a CTO requires a lot of skills, soft and hard.
- it requires a lot of experience.
- it is a great responsibility
- it's a long path, but it's worth it