It can be hard to tell what somebody else’s job actually is. If you’ve never done it, you don’t know what really matters.

Job adverts with bulleted lists of skills give some indication, yet somehow don’t get to the heart of it. The language really matters, writing it clearly, describing tasks in a concrete way. Avoiding lapsing into language that others won’t understand.

For ScraperWiki right now, we’ve had a go at describing what our new CTO would do, written unusually as if by somebody who was doing the job.

It doesn’t mention that we’re using a lot of CoffeeScript, or that containerisation is strategically important to us. It doesn’t describe anything else about the company, we assume you can find that elsewhere.

Hopefully it does convey what a good Chief Technology Officer would do for the core infrastructure of a platform-based company.