Balancing Coding and Management with Dhruba Borthakur

Dhruba Borthakur is the Co-founder and CTO at Rockset but still manages to write code, on a good week, 50% of the time. In today's interview, Dhruba explained his ethos, namely that he likes to code to add value to other developers’ lives, and discussed how it is essential to create a culture where every person on the team feels empowered to make decisions that bring the organization to the next level.

As one of the founding architects of Hadoop software, Dhruba also shares his insights on how and why Hadoop was created as well as the difference between putting together teams for shipping software externally versus SaaS (software as a service) products. Tune in!

[00:25] - How Dhruba became a CTO[02:06] - Transitioning to team management[04:59] - Building a supportive culture[07:50] - Solving tomorrow's problems[10:34] - Creation of the Hadoop file system[16:21] - Recruiting for an open-source project[19:34] - Finding rock star engineers at Rockset[27:36] - Team geography[30:15] - Fail fast and learn quickly[32:12] - Pulling the plug[36:17] - Fast-moving teams[41:25] - Finding time to write code

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!

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Podcast episode production by Dante32.