Angelo started quora website Quora

They used to be good engineers, but as they walked the road to becoming a boss with dozens of employees, do they still need to write code for the product themselves?

Adam D'Angelo, co-founder and CEO of Quora, provided its own answer to this question: Need.

As Facebook's first CTO, Angelo has been responsible for many of Facebook's new product development and management of the entire team of engineers. In 2008, Angelo started quora Web site Quora.

Although it has become CEO and want to do a lot of management, but Angelo has not discarded his basic skills as an engineer: writing code.

Earlier news also came out, Facebook CEO Zuckerberg in the company has 500 million users, but also personally write some product code.

Why they have such a choice, Angela may write the answer in Quora may give you inspiration:

As a CEO in charge of a company of this size, I still think it is not a good idea to write a lot of code. But writing a small amount of code and keeping it in touch with the codebase can bring a lot of benefits:

• It gives you an idea of ​​how hard it is for others to accomplish their tasks. This is important for forming the basic intuition that something is easy to do and what is difficult to do. This will allow you to naturally push the company to do more valuable projects.

• It gives you a better understanding of engineers. If a project takes a long time, is it because the project itself is too difficult or is it because everyone is not motivated enough or is it not suitable for the job? Although there are many ways in which these problems can be found, But if you understand the programming work yourself, your intuition will be more accurate and you will get more correct conclusions.

• It will help you to conclude that we need to slow down the product development process and devote more energy to improving the productivity of our engineers. In many companies, this idea does not happen. While some supervisors consider these issues, many companies greatly underestimate the value of improving the technology architecture. Because the costs and benefits in this area are not obvious to many CEOs.

With that being said, however, the amount of codebase updates is huge, keeping track of the latest ones is a costly affair. Every week there will be new ways, new architecture, new features built. Those who write code every day if you want to master these, it will be much simpler. But as a CEO, if you do not write the code for months, it will take a lot of energy when you're going to provide some major improvements to these projects. So, I tend to keep a long-term focus on some of the project prototyping and code areas I'm familiar with or I'm really concerned about.

Of course, there is a certain risk in the CEO writing code, that is, you will create some code loopholes. Because you are not writing for a long time, you may not know the latest progress of the entire project. Even worse, these vulnerabilities can become difficult to fix later when you finish. So when I write the code, I also ask myself for the engineer's standard to reduce mistakes. Because when you make a mistake, you may not have time to patch, after all, you have a bunch of meetings waiting to open.

In addition to focusing on Quora's own code base, I developed an Android application a few weeks ago. I do this thing, on the one hand it is interesting, on the other hand, but also to better understand the Android platform.