Ask HN: What Is a CTO Org?

[hacknat]

I just got an email from a recruiter from a large-ish (mkt cap ~$10B) tech company asking me to apply for a Senior position in their “CTO Org”. I’ve never heard of this before. I can kind of guess that it’s some small group that reports to the CTO, but I’m curious what the dynamics are of something like this. Has anyone done something like this before?

FYI, I’m at a (well-known) startup right now, and the largest company I’ve worked for had ~$5B cap.

[genmud]

Some orgs have an "office of the CTO" where they put technical experts and advisors that guide larger technology orgs. I have seen this work really well, and really poorly, it just depends on the company and how the CTO function is viewed.

Most of the time you will have strategy work, feasibility, prototyping and larger organizational type of things come out of this role.

[giantg2]

That's how our company does it too. That group tend to build the pipelines, build the tools, and publish patterns for the rest of the teams to use.

[kubanczyk]

Is this Juniper? They have an enormous entity with hundreds of devs doing the usual grunt product-related work, which they always call "CTO org". Nothing special about it.

[hacknat]

You got it. Thanks for the warning.

[ganoushoreilly]

Exactly that, usually a team directly run and managed by the CEO directly. I see a lot of security positions placed in these types of structures.