Matthue Deyarus

The first 15 years of my 40-year IT career I held mostly pure coding jobs in a large host of systems spanning everything from the old Unix servers to personal computers to the web…and in a diversity of languages and frameworks. After that I became interested in leading teams of other coders and ended up heading up groups of anywhere from 5 to 100 in many different industries – scientific labs, high finance, federal government, etc. – in a dozen different countries. Because of my early background, I have always mixed arms-length management with closer ‘rolled up sleeves’ periods where I am directly involved in the technology.

This has taken the form of everything from direct coding to repository review, to DevOps management. I have worked with large budgets such as a Soros fund project that was north of $100 billion and I have worked with smaller ones as well, such as various temporary CTO engagements with organic food companies in Boulder County. I have extensive exposure to regulatory issues because I have worked for about 10 years in close association with the Federal governments of the U.S. and U.K. While working with the department of Health and Human Services (U.S.), I became involved in a project which had to condense 108 former ‘.gov’ websites into a single master site. This involved navigating politics and diplomacy between dozens of departments and required recruiting, guiding and leading hundreds of developers.

My chief joy in all this is getting the best out of my team members by eliciting their inner talents and encouraging community and creativity. When someone knows what they are doing I try to manage with a light touch and create room for their merit to shine through. When someone is struggling, I become much more involved and try to encourage a very transparent ecosystem where people feel listened to and taken care of. It is the intersection and synthesis of organizational culture and technology development that inspires me the most.