Profound CTO Learnings of 2021

https://theventury.com/blog/leadership-learnings-of-2021/

by DerCommodore • 5 years ago

37 18 5 years ago

segaboy81• 5 years ago

Drivel. The whole purpose of this is for Jakob Reiter, whoever that is, to highlight what a great leader he is. It's all about upward mobility, and having a showpiece like this is all part of the act. I don't know Jakob, but I know from reading this he is probably untrustworthy and will do whatever is necessary to succeed. These types have evolved over the years... in the 80s, they were sharp and cutthroat. Afterall, that's what was in vogue. Now they've adapted to today's cultural zietgeist, making sure that everyone knows how forward-thinking they are, how hip they are to inclusivity, yadda-yadda.. It's just a game that these inauthentic types are very good at playing. Well, we all share the same dirt in the end, my friend.

MarcelOlsz2• 5 years ago

Reminds me of the soylent founders blog where it was something about buying cheap clothing from Taiwan that he only wears once a day, powers everything with some balcony solar panel, etc. Wish I could find it again.

riskycodes• 5 years ago

Do you mean this? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/op-ed-how-i-gave-up-...

Wavelets• 5 years ago

Great summary. This article was probably put together by HR/Comms. So much of this crap on LinkedIn. “#leadership”.

nmca• 5 years ago

This is satire, no?

tonyjstark• 5 years ago

Pretty much what I was thinking. This post is as deep as a bunch of motivational quotes on Insta, one platitude after another.

tedmiston3• 5 years ago

It's a 43-person company and the author is already a Partner — what kind of upward mobility would he need or be after in the first place?

IMO the main issue is the HN title having been edited to Profound CTO Learnings of 2021 while the actual post is titled Leadership Learnings of 2021. Two misused terms I don't think HN takes lightly are profound and CTO.

jackblemming• 5 years ago

With that, we remind ourselves that if we repeat part of the source code it should be abstracted and not repeated. We do this because we hope that by that we later have a central place to change things in case something happens. We want to reduce redundancy.

This doesn't demonstrate a deep understanding of DRY to me, which is not a great sign for a CTO.

tedmiston3• 5 years ago

I would have said refactored over abstracted, admittedly a nit, and I don't get the impression that this post's intended technical audience is super technical.

chroem-• 5 years ago

While I acknowledge that English is a living language and subject to change over time, I refuse to accept that "learnings" is a real word.

nescioquid• 5 years ago

I've wondered why people favor a pluralized gerund over the perfectly good alternative "lessons". Probably people who use this word are just mimicking a speech affect, or signalling a verbal register (dynamic manager-of-action)?

"Learnings" will probably become as unremarkable as using "impact" to mean influence or effect.

While I acknowledge that English is a living language...

We can be both descriptivist and cultivate good style (whatever that means to each of us).

spaetzleesser2• 5 years ago

What do you think about “asks”?

spaetzleesser2• 5 years ago

I don’t know about this guy but I think it should be required that if one of these “leaders” writes about “leadership” to also hear from the people they are leading. I have been in several presentations where some manager would brag about their leadership secrets where I knew that reality was completely different.

Seems to me that “leadership” is full of self promoters and it doesn’t really matter if their stuff actually works as long it’s written nicely.

rramadass• 5 years ago

Very True. The whole Leadership/Management "Industry" has since long ago become inauthentic. Nobody trusts and takes them at face value anymore.

Checkout the works of Jeffrey Pfeffer for some honest criticisms.

tedmiston3• 5 years ago

I'm going to go against the grain of the comments so far: (1) the title on HN is misstated / way too lofty but there is some [non-technical] substance here, (2) the title on HN says "CTO" while this person's title in the article is "Partner & Head of IT", (3) "Profound" is nowhere to be found in the title or article itself.

A more fitting title for HN might be: Some zen-inspired reflections on 2021 from a leader of an incubator / agency.

That said, I think the post could have benefitted from editing. It's a bit stuff and wordy... and could have probably communicated the same info more effectively at ~1/3 of its current length.

itsdrewmiller2• 5 years ago

You're supposed to use the actual article title on HN unless there is a good reason you can't. I agree with everything else about your take.

itsdrewmiller2• 5 years ago

The actual title of the article is "Leadership Learnings of 2021" - I don't know if the poster was being sarcastic or not in the editorialization of the title, but it definitely comes off that way and I think is leading to some of the mean-spirited comments. @dang

Profound CTO Learnings of 2021

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