On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 4:47 PM, George Herbert<george.herb...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 5:57 PM, Brion Vibber<br...@wikimedia.org> wrote: >> On 8/7/09 5:43 PM, George Herbert wrote: >>> I suspect you're going to have to be prepared to do a lot of internal >>> discovery and discovery with potential hires to show them the web ops >>> side - it's not well documented now (I keep meaning to find out more >>> about the ops team and finding I have no time to join the IRC channel >>> 24x7 ;-P ). The team seems to function well - servers seem decently >>> stable - but it's not clear to me if the process and documentation is >>> up to industry standards for large website operations. At some point >>> tribal knowledge has to yield to documentation and process and >>> organizational knowledge. >> >> Oh yes, this is already very much an ongoing process as we've been >> increasing the ops staff this last year. > > > One addition that popped up in my head overnight. > > You've been describing the role as CTO, but I think in US IT industry > standard naming schemes it's really more of a CIO role. > > CTO tends to be associated with development (hardware/software), the > sort of role I understand Brion will be still handling going forwards. > > CIO is more of the IT operations manager, both for inwards and > outwards facing environments. Large websites sometimes have CTO for > outwards facing IT environments, but with a breakdown of IT vs > development I think the standard industry naming may make more sense. > > I understood what you had in mind from the first email, but I think a > typical IT candidate seeing CTO would think something very different > at first, and the label and first impression can make a big difference > in who you can find and how they approach the role. > > > -- > -george william herbert > george.herb...@gmail.com > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l >
This is a very true point. To people not in the industry, there seems to be little distinction between the two titles. And a lot of companies only have a CIO or CTO, further leading people to believe there is no difference. There is certainly more "tech" involved in a CTO. Clever of them to put the word in there :) -Chad _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l