#125 - Two CTO Dinosaurs vs. Today's Tech Hype with Raz Shuty // CTO @ auxmoney
Unfiltered insights on microservices myths, cloud cost reality, and pragmatic technical leadership
alphalist.CTO Podcast - For CTOs and Technical Leaders
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Show Notes
Two veteran CTOs tear down today's tech hype with brutal honesty and hard-won experience. Raz Schweiger-Shuty shares his controversial approach to technical leadership at auxmoney, where he stopped a microservices rewrite and focused on business outcomes over engineering trends.
From his early days as a QA engineer to running 80-person engineering organizations, Raz demonstrates why sometimes the best technical decision is the boring one that actually works. This conversation offers a masterclass in pragmatic technical leadership for an age obsessed with the latest frameworks and architectures.
Key insights for technical leaders: ā¢ šļø Domain-driven design as prerequisite for any architectural decision ā¢ š° FinOps strategies that connect engineering decisions to business metrics ā¢ š Modular monolith patterns for teams of 40+ engineers ā¢ š Why velocity metrics are vanity and DORA metrics matter ā¢ š« Avoiding Kubernetes complexity when elasticity isn't needed ā¢ š„ Conway's Law applied to value stream organization ā¢ š§ Platform engineering pitfalls and centralization nightmares
TIMESTAMPS: [00:01:00] Show premise: Two CTO Dinosaurs vs. Today's Tech Hype [00:03:56] Raz's unconventional path: QA to CTO via pragmatic learning [00:08:31] Junior vs senior engineers in the AI era [00:11:01] auxmoney: 17 years without a CTO, then Raz arrives [00:13:45] Stopping the microservices migration: building trust through disagreement [00:15:08] Language choices: PHP works, Rust creates hiring problems [00:19:35] Modular monolith strategy using domain-driven design [00:21:56] Value stream teams and Conway's Law alignment [00:22:26] Kubernetes reality check: elasticity vs complexity overhead [00:29:53] FinOps deep dive: ā¬120k to ā¬85k AWS cost reduction [00:32:13] Cost-per-transaction metrics for engineering accountability [00:35:00] Platform engineering centralization dangers [00:40:22] Velocity metrics are broken: focus on DORA instead [00:43:54] Meantime to recovery as team health indicator [00:48:34] Bottom-up AI adoption: Cursor rollout strategy [00:54:16] Fintech security: ISO 27001 and AI supply chain risks [00:56:59] Leadership lessons: building trust through authentic communication