What If You Don't Want To Be a Developer Anymore? w/ CTO Connection's Peter Bell

**Peter Bell** (0:00)
The specifics of this was, I wanted a place where senior engineering leaders could share problems and get answers. Where's the one place, like what's stack overflow for management?
And I've not found it, and so I wanted to go build it.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:14)
Hey everyone, it's Conor Bronsdon, Dev Interrupted executive producer. So you might have heard that back in September, we held our first ever live virtual engineering leadership conference, Interact. With over 600 engineers and engineering leaders in attendance, Interact was a big hit with our audience and produced some amazing interviews, like Maria Gutierrez's talk on scaling engineering processes, which has become our biggest episode of all time.
So I'm incredibly excited to announce that Interact will be making its return on April 7th. You can check out the whole lineup and register at devinterrupted.com/interact, which we will have in the links below. We hope to see you there. Now on with today's episode.

**Dan Lines** (0:50)
Hey, what's up everyone? Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host Dan Lines, and today I'm joined by Peter Bell, the founder and CTO at CTO Connection.
Peter, thanks so much for joining us.

**Peter Bell** (1:03)
Dan, thanks so much for inviting me on. Great to finally get to hang out.

**Dan Lines** (1:07)
Yeah, finally get to hang out. Awesome to have you on the show. Definitely excited to have you here. You have a really interesting background. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about your background and kind of what drew you to the engineering leadership space and where you are today?

**Peter Bell** (1:25)
Well, I think I landed in engineering leadership by accident because I started off a technical high school bachelor and master's in computer and electronic engineering. Then I'm like, okay, I'm going to become a therapist. So I did neuro-linguistic programming in Ericssonian Hypnotherapy, created a sales trading company, moved from London to the US. And then back in 1996, I finally got back into tech. I started an interactive ad agency with websites and CD-ROMs and tools for salespeople to calculate things on their laptops.
And that was great. The wonderful thing, it's like I still remember going into one of these little oilfield service companies. And seriously, we couldn't actually afford to, but this was back when you had to buy programming languages like Visual Basic 4
And we couldn't afford to buy it. So I got a copy of PowerPoint. I made something where it looked like it was a real CD-ROM catalog. But all I was doing was I was clicking on the buttons, but the buttons were really just part of the image. And then somebody was like, sure, here's 10 grand to go build that. I'm like, fine, now we can afford the software. So I started programming again, that was fun. I raised a bunch of money to build million dollar websites for a thousand bucks a month at the Strategy Factory back in 1999 So yes, we invented Squarespace first.
They did a little bit or commercializing it.

**Dan Lines** (2:48)
Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. I love that, that's so cool.

**Peter Bell** (2:52)
A little bit of everything. And then the engineering leadership, I think it was to scale my impact, right? Cause it was great writing code, use just this immediate, like tangible thing. Like I've got an idea, I can build this thing in the world. But with engineering leadership, you could actually direct a group of people to write more software than you could ship on your own.

**Dan Lines** (3:11)
Actually that always, I think happens with inventions. You have kind of the inventors that do the thing first. They do pretty well.
Then there's always someone that comes along and says like, let me put this, it's already invented. I just need to make it a little bit better and more scale, right? Something like that.

**Peter Bell** (3:27)
Absolutely. And I think it's like, I mean, it's funny when you see, I mean, like Dropbox, they couldn't get funding cause they've once like, yeah, yeah, we've tried file backup. It doesn't work. It loses money.
Turns out Drew Houston managed to figure it out.

**Dan Lines** (3:40)
That's really cool. That's an awesome background. I want to move us to our first topic around different things that a developer could do besides climbing maybe the typical corporate ladder. So there's a lot of developers out there who maybe don't realize how many career paths are actually available to them. Sometimes it's easy to, you know, you get a job or you do get a job out of school, you get locked into this idea of, okay, maybe I'm going to just become an engineering team leader or a manager, maybe a great individual contributor, which is all great, but there's other stuff out there.