from Hacker News

Someone I work with who has worked at one of the largest tech companies wrote the following as a comment in our internal channels. I'm sharing here because I've been hearing similar sentiments about the CIO roles over the past six years while working in tech. I'm curious about what everyone else thinks.

"Traditional/Legacy/PE owned structures of business consider "IT" as a cost - divorced from their product offering or business. IT organizations in such settings are managing inflated service contracts for over a dozen outsourced technology or business integrations.

"Layers of IT 'VPs' and 'Directors' are busy managing external (sales) parties with very little knowledge of the underlying technology or the product offering being used. Most of the day to day activities are managing outages, upgrades, business expectations & complaints around functionality, and worst of all - security issues. Needless to say, all of which the resident "IT" organization is incapable of directly managing.

"At the top of this facade sits the CIO role who spends most of their time haggling for external resource or services. This is a mutation of the Peter Principle that has paralyzed entire industries.

"There is no room to prioritize product or technology evolution in a CIOs calendar."