Bangalore: The similarities between the roles of a Vice President of Engineering (VPoE) and the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) are difficult to differentiate for startups. But, as businesses grow, CTOs and VPoEs perform different functions.

Being in the technical department, explaining the right way to do these jobs would be more difficult than to illustrate “anti-patterns” (or bad examples) for people in these roles since both are equally important, noted Joyent’s CTO Jason Hoffman, and VPoE Bryan Cantrill, at the Monki Gras—a casual conference conducted by the industry analyst firm RedMonk. Joyent is a cloud computing and systems software providing company.

Examples CTOs and VPoEs should NOT follow

Cantrill and Hoffman listed a number of examples that CTOs and VPoEs would do best not to follow:

1. The Critic- These CTOs constantly explain why things don’t work, and serve as a classic bad example for people in the role.

2. The Xenophobe- You can't be a CTO and be against visiting customers. If you aren’t enthusiastic about meeting customers in their environment, you probably are not meeting the norms for being a CTO.