Geeks Who Lead Podcast
Hear the inside stories of the "geeks who lead at scale" - Directors, VPs and CTOs running software engineering orgs at larger companies with 100+ engineers, and interviews with domain experts who can help those leaders to manage their engineering orgs more effectively.
I'm your host - Peter Bell, I've been helping senior engineering leaders to connect with and learn from their peers since 2010!
This podcast is designed for engineering leaders who want to learn the latest good practices from their peers who are way too busy operating to write an article or publish a book!
Running a software engineering org at scale is hard! You need to manage stakeholder expectations, attract and retain top talent, align and structure your org effectively and keep up with the latest processes and tooling. And that's before we even try to make sense of the potential impact of LLMs and GenAI on managing technical teams.
Our podcast and weekly newsletter provide you with access to hard-won wisdom from top engineering leaders and relevant domain experts. Learn more at https://geekswholead.com/
Geeks Who Lead Podcast
Tackling Burnout as a CTO with Andy Skipper
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Working nonstop without delegating is not a sustainable way to live or work. Such habits often lead to burnout. CTOs in particular struggle with this problem. Many are young, inexperienced, or desirous of being part of a shippable product to relinquish control. Andy Skipper was once such a CTO himself. Now he coaches and mentors other CTOs with his company, CTO Craft.
Andy joined Peter for this week’s episode of CTO Connection to discuss what burnout is, how to identify it, and what tools you can use to turn things around. Listen to this important conversation for tips and advice on beating burnout.
- [01:26] - The early days of Andy's career
- [06:19] - The vision behind founding CTO Craft
- [07:56] - Patterns of burnout
- [11:29] - Heuristics for prevention
- [15:46] - Walking away from the golden handcuffs
- [19:36] - Mismatched expectations & resources
- [20:08] - Communication, helping others, and polyphasic sleeping
- [25:55] - Couples therapy for founders and lead technologists
- [28:50] - Cutting losses
- [30:42] - Finding a sustainable pace
- [33:54] - Step out of the situation
Special thanks to our global partner – Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS offers a broad set of global cloud-based products to equip technology leaders to build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.