Geeks Who Lead Podcast Tackling Burnout as a CTO with Andy Skipper
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!
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