You plan. Design. Code v0.1. Re-plan. Code, code, code. Test. Demo. Test, test. Fix. Test. You go live.
Status quo feels safe. Today feels like yesterday. Auto-pilot is on. Change is hard. Because by changing we are risking status quo in order to gain. The pain of loss is much greater than the allure of gain. We do not feel so bad about losing out on big gains but we desperately try to avoid even small losses.
The differences in how we value risk help to explain why the derivatives, futures markets and junk bonds are worth trillions. Smart investors will buy risk from people at a discount.
Most underrated quality in hiring has to be conscientiousness.
Categories
Two-speed IT
Makes sense to go for “two-speed IT”, in which you separate fast-moving and more innovative IT (data-crunching, say) from more basic services (payroll processing, for instance).
Use Audacity to record WAV files for your IVR.
Small sample sizes reduce precision of estimation. Try to acquire more data but avoid simply adding “more of the same” as obtaining lots of small samples from the same population will not help. Applied more broadly: seek different opinions to avoid confirmation bias.
Google Experiments don’t support serving geography-driven landing pages. MaxMind free API allows you to query user’s IP address and determine user’s ISP location.
The devs, test, suppprt, PMs are most important in the next 60 seconds. Because they are in the front line. Not you.
However over a year, CTO is important since the decisions you make as the CTO will impact ability of the IT org to respond to market changes, competative threats and new regulation.
As the CTO you are not important in the next 60 seconds. Dev fixing bugs, writing a line of code, support helping a user, PM holding a project meeting are all more important than you.
It’s hard to stay humble when everyone laughs at your jokes. But you are probbaly least important person in the IT organisation in the next 60 seconds.
How do you create a high-volume telephony solution with database lookup IVR in another country in 2 weeks?
Use Colt as primary and Sonetel as backup.