Understanding CTOs
Or what I learned from Werner Vogels at LISA 2009.
I’ve been at LISA 2009 and saw the keynote given by Amazon’s CTO. Here’s what I learned from it: figure out what you’re spending more than 50% of your resources doing, then figure out how to eliminate it. Repeat.
Before I go deeper into why I thought that’s what he was saying, two points.
- Yes, I saw the sexist slide. I didn’t feel offended at the time because it seemed his reaction was genuine. He prefaced his talk by saying many people had asked him to restructure his talk to target it more at the audience of system administrators. He explained he’d rearranged his slide deck and there had already been some spots where it seemed to me he was working to change his usual points. So when he pulled up a slide with a girl pointing a gun and seemed to blank on what he wanted to say, it seemed genuine to me. It could have been staged. What seemed like an attempt to get a laugh out of the audience and move on could have been scripted. But it didn’t seem that way to me at the time.
- My closest friends may well be wondering why I’m taking seriously anything Amazon has to say. I’m still mad about the 1-click patent, I actively advocate for people to buy from Powell’s if they want to buy books online, I haven’t bought anything from Amazon from years and even then it was gifts for other people. The crowd around me during his speech reacted badly, perceiving it as nothing more than a sales pitch for Amazon Web Services. Which, yes, there was a lot of that to it. But I think that’s understandable. If you’re a CxO at a company and you’re speaking to an audience and you’re not selling your company at least a little bit all the time, you worry me more.
So. Why would I be talking about Amazon’s CTO? It’s because of what I thought I was hearing when I filtered out the sales pitch. Perhaps it’s just the CTOs I’ve worked with recently but it seemed to me that there was a pattern to the way they think about company operations that I can finally wrap my head around and see the similarities in. It’s this: a CTO looks for big technological patterns inside and outside the organization. I know, I’m the last to notice this.
But now I took this observation and tried to think like a CTO for myself and I realized the first thing I need to do is get better at measuring the time I put in to things. My intuition is that better than half of my time is spent changing configurations. Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s something I can record and measure and analyze. Whatever it is that’s consuming all of my time at work, I can look for a way to drastically reduce it. Whether it’s as simple as stopping doing it or as complex as automating it or as pedestrian as paying someone else to do it, I think I can take this epiphany and I make my job better.
So that’s what I got out of his talk.
I hated it less than some other people, less than I expected myself to. In fact, I didn’t hate it at all, I learned something from it and it’s going to change how I do my job. Which is perhaps the best I can hope for from a keynote address at a technical conference.
Tags: lisa
