Ask HN: Transitioning from DevOps to co-founder/CTO/lead dev?
As reluctant as I am to say it, you may get by fine as I have worked with CTOs with less broad technical background. I will point out a number of things I&#x27;m picking up on that may cause problems:<p>- shouldn&#x27;t belittle co-workers based on age or any other non-merit: &quot;being the adult&quot;. Late 30s is not that much experience. You admittedly lack some experience in other areas.<p>- your experience in &quot;architecting&quot; seems to be ops-related. There are bigger architecture issues that precede it, namely back-end and front-end program architecture. Without this experience, you may make some bad calls and not even be aware of it for a long time as critique of one may just sound like opinion without a deeper understanding.<p>- seems that in the 90s, you did have &#x27;motivation&#x27; to stay on the leading edge or at least keep up. It&#x27;s fairly common for a CTO to have lost some of their edge, and practice but they should have at one time been deep in the full stack.<p>- &quot;Frontend dev seems overwhelming&quot; -- it&#x27;s not, just do a React tutorial, Vue is easier for picking up the way things are connected but React is more prevalent.<p>- &quot;backend dev pointless without an idea&quot;. This is the most alarming. Any upper management needs to have drive to get whatever needs doing done. You&#x27;ve identified these are blockers and at the same time labelled it pointless. Getting stuff done means not only working on the goal but also working on resolving all the blockers impeding progress to that goal. Perhaps, I&#x27;m misreading this and your perception is that this is not a blocker, hence this &#x27;Ask&#x27; posting to determine just that. Some things don&#x27;t add up like &quot;missing these opportunities to less experienced engineers&quot;. If they&#x27;re &#x27;less experienced&#x27; than how come they can take the opportunities you&#x27;re missing?<p>All that said, you may be able to carry on, but do find some way to make an unbiased assessment of where you&#x27;re currently at. The worst type of any manager is one who operates with a level of insecurity or fear.