Don't Hire the Brilliant Jerk: A CTO's Playbook for Building Teams

“Don’t hire the brilliant jerk.”

That’s just one of the hard truths Zach Goldberg—CTO of Gruntwork and author of The Startup CTO’s Handbook—shares in this episode of Commit & Push.

Zach joins host Damien Filiatrault to talk about:
– Why most performance review systems fail
– The real reason developer productivity metrics go sideways
– How to avoid overengineering your stack into chaos
– When to use contingent teams—and when it backfires
– What actually works when scaling a dev team

Whether you’re a first-time CTO or a seasoned tech lead, this is the kind of practical advice you won’t find in management books.

🎧 Full episode available now. Don’t miss it.

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:03 Zach’s Journey to Becoming a Startup CTO
03:15 What is Gruntwork?
05:57 Balancing a Full-Time CTO Role with Coaching
06:50 Writing The Startup CTO’s Handbook
11:40 Lessons in Management and Hiring
16:22 Setting Goals & Metrics for Engineers
22:22 Full-Time vs. Fractional CTOs
28:12 Keeping Software Development Simple
30:51 Developer Productivity
34:50 Overhyped and Underrated Tech
44:43 Will AI Replace Developers?
49:38 Why Every CTO Should Consider Coaching
51:25 Where Can You Find Zach Online?

Topics Discussed:
Startup CTO Handbook, CTO Best Practices, CTO Coaching Building and Managing High-Performing Tech Teams, Effective Hiring Strategies for Startups, Contractors vs. Full-Time Engineers, Fractional CTOs, Evaluating New Tech, AI-Powered Coding Tool

#StartupCTO #DeveloperProductivity #Gruntwork #TechLeadership #EngineeringManagement #TechHiring #SoftwareDevelopment #CTOTips #InfrastructureAsCode

Видео Don't Hire the Brilliant Jerk: A CTO's Playbook for Building Teams канала Commit & Push