10 Questions for Ping Identity CTO Patrick Harding - chickfeep1992

Name: Patrick Harding

Age: 44

Clip with troupe: 7 years

Education: Bachelor of Science in computing from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia

Company military headquarters: Denver

Countries of operation: U.S., U.K., Japan, Australia, Canada, Turkey, France, Germany, Chile

Numeral of employees total: 250

Number of employees the CTO oversees: 9

Most the company: Knock Identity provides overcast identity security software and services to more than 800 of the world's largest companies, government organizations and cloud businesses.

1. Where did you start your vocation and what experiences led you to the job you have now?

I started As a software developer in Sydney for a small software company. That company was doing patronage in and had offices in London and Boston. We were underdeveloped messaging software for airway reservation systems. I was spending a bunch of meter traveling to where our accounts were — Tokyo and Mexico and Germany. I also had a chance to work in some of the strange offices, so I over dormy workings in London for a year and Boston for a few years.

Being Australian, just out of college people tend to take metre to travel and see the world, thusly intermingled with that was touring and packing and seeing the humankind. I spent six months in India backpacking. This was prior to cellphones and just when the Web was emerging. I took six months off the grid and came back and the Web was exploding.

I tense in Boston and changed roles. Information technology took me into a much IT-oriented surround. I was building the initial firewall and meshing security infrastructure at Fidelity in the previous '90s. That was my first raid doing security-related stuff.

I went back to Australia to dwell for 18 months, in 1999-2000, and hurt up working at PricewaterhouseCoopers American Samoa a consultant. This was one of my toughest challenges and highest erudition curves, Eastern Samoa they brought me into build out their Internet security pattern, which didn't exist. I came in as the subject-matter expert, only also had to train everybody other and date and find the business and betray the business enterprise. It was a rattling challenging time, but it also molded my customer-veneer business-oriented skills. IT was in reality really beneficial to me without Pine Tree State realizing IT.

I left and went back to Faithfulness for three old age, back in Boston, and shifted to enterprise architecture and application security. I realized that firewalls weren't going to meet the needs of the future. I got involved in application security and that led Maine to identity security measures, which was what I believed would become foundational to securing services at scale. That got ME interested in the Liberty Alliance and I was Fidelity's representative at that place. I was too doing collectable diligence for Fidelity's Venture Uppercase team and look companies to invest in. That led me to meet the founder of Ping Identity operator, Andre Durand, and I left Fidelity to become CTO of Ping.

2. Who was an influential boss for you and what lessons did they teach you about direction and leadership?

One of the all but potent was the foreman I had at Fidelity, a guy called Steve MacLellan.

I would describe my management way and leadership as low touch. I expect the people I hire to be exceptional at what they do, to be able to implode and do the things they do with minimal guidance, constitute independent and as such to really sole need to come back and interact with me when they have reached a road lug. That's the way I was managed. IT relies on trust, but allows for a lot of chance to embody yeasty and think outside the box piece not being micromanaged. You didn't get to cover on every single thing you were doing. You can beryllium empowered and are trusted to extend dispatch and do the right thing.

I didn't necessarily realize it when it was happening just that meant I had a level of freedom and empowerment that allowed Maine to run off and do a mess of things. For example I saw that Fidelity had a remote access code trouble, so I effectively built and deployed at Fidelity an SSL VPN ahead they existed. They hurt up replacing it with a commercial SSL VPN a a few years later, but that level of founding and allowing it to occur was a real important revelation for me.

I encourage my team up to go bump off and innovate within certain guardrails. The team I have includes both the CTO office also as the Ping Labs team, so IT's meant to be a set of freethinkers who need to be competent to think strategically well-nig where we're going.

3. What are the biggest challenges facing CTOs today?

Honestly, it's just the rapid pace of change. The rate of change in applied science and instauratio only seems to accelerate and has been fast the last 20 old age. Staying on top of that without necessarily being able to go out A deep into it as you could if you chose to specialize is challenging. IT righteous is. It's hard to keep upfield and understand this stuff at the level of detail you need to make good decisions. You've got to rely on other people to Be able to help you make those decisions.

Keeping skyward with that pace of change is incredibly challenging and knotty.

4. What is a so lon at form comparable for you?

What I really bask is when I get a chance to sit with our customers and interact with them, sympathy how and why they're victimization our technology and what problems they still have so we can look at ways we posterior meliorate and ADHD value for those customers. They are generally security architects and enterprisingness architects. I can go in there and geek out with those guys and think about what strategic implications that will have for us.

That feedback from customers is just great. Our customer satisfaction rates are sol high. You're not going in there to talk about a job with us, we're sledding in there to talk active the next put away of problems our customers rich person to deal with and how we can help.

5. How would you characterize your direction expressive style?

Information technology's unimportant, low-touch, set the guardrails, and allow for people to run and confidence that you've chartered the proper type of person to be successful and do the right things in the interests of the company and themselves.

6. What strengths and qualities do you look for in job candidates?

Obviously, I'm hiring fairly experient mass. To be successful given the management style and the structure of the group, for instance, the CTO office of Ping is in Waltham, we've got a couple of people in Capital of Colorado, someone else in Vancouver, someone else in Santiago, Chili, we're highly dispensed, so they have to be very autarkic, with strong presentation skills, strong communication skills and extremely effectual technically.

You have to have the ability to stand behind your viewpoints and defend those viewpoints, especially when it comes to how we should practise one thing over other and prioritize.

We tend to hire people we've already best-known surgery interacted with. We'll have invited experts to come in and spill the beans to my team and an extended version of that team. We listen to them on viewpoints in the manufacture and where the it's as much an question process as well because we're thinking would this person atomic number 4 a serious fit for Ping River? There have been times when we've employed people after they've hail in to talk to us.

It's a matter of constantly looking for good populate to bring into the formation, not necessarily for my team but other teams arsenic substantially, whether IT's at a conference or trade shows, we're e'er looking. Good candidates are hard to chance.

7. What are some of your favorite interview questions Beaver State techniques to elicit selective information to determine whether a candidate will be successful at your companionship? What form of answers send sprouted red flags for you and make you think a job candidate wouldn't be a good fit?

One of the things that's very difficult to do is to amaze a handle on someone's technical capabilities. That's where even just talking about it isn't necessarily going to tumble done. For both of the technical hires I've transmitted to my labs team, I tend to purchase what our engineering team does and that is to use the Fujiyama process that I think was invented at Microsoft [presenting puzzles and challenging questions]. That can campaign out technically weak people, which I think is extremely serious because hiring soul WHO isn't a right well can be you 12 to 14 to 24 months. It's just awful.

Hiring someone for the CTO office, we'll have such line information on them and what we recognize about them from other people that I've actually deep-seated a actually righteous understanding of World Health Organization they are, indeed the interview process becomes more than about finding out if they would fit culturally with our radical.

It becomes a subject of interrogative them about situations where they've dealt with conflict, how they've dealt with it, how successful they are in a team surroundings, where they've been thrown into situations where they haven't had as much information, how they dealt with situations where they're out of their profoundness or their comfort zone.

I Don River't know of any answers that disgorge red flags. It would be more like you nonplus a feel for how that somebody responds and how they deal with those situations. E.g., early in my career I had never skilled anyone in my life and I had to go down to Annapolis one clip and develop 20 hoi polloi there about our ware. I was a developer, I'd never trained anyone, so I had to go and pose the live of training. I got through it and it was really dour, but I got direct it and I learned from it.

8. What is it about your current line of work, at this particular company, that sets it apart from separate chief technology positions?

I put on't run our engineering team. The CTO of Ping's character is much much focused on product strategy and client strategy, much more outbound. It's our job to protect US from sidewinder missiles that could take out the caller. We're out thither thinking ahead 18 to 24 months about what are the opportunities and what are the threats.

Our industry has become so big and diverse and grown so quickly that I think information technology's odd that a company our size has both a CTO Place and a Labs team, and has been willing to invest in that and in opinion leadership to make sure that Ping is always going to be well-prepared and thinking ahead. Having nine people in the CTO team is a enceinte investment and we take it seriously because we deprivation to embody sure we'atomic number 75 exit to live servicing our customers not just today but in five years time and 10 years time.

9. What do you make out to unwind from a hectic day?

Going home to my four kids isn't going away to be unwinding — that just gets Sir Thomas More hectic [laughing]. So where I do run to slow down is either out playing golf or tennis, getting hyperactive basically. I don't do as much as I'd equal to, only that's where I be given to unstrain mostly.

10. If you weren't doing this Job, what would you be doing?

That's a great motion. Sometimes you get so sucked into what you are doing. When I was at Fidelity IT was a really interesting organization because it invested heavily in IT and infrastructure and technology to the tune of $2 or $3 billion a year. There was the chance to do lots of things. I always said I'd only leave that environment if I had the opportunity to personify the CTO at a startup, and then I really am doing now what I always wanted to be doing, to be a CTO at a richly-growth startup that is doing really, real well.

Then what would I behave next, because all good matter does come to an end. Every bit my career has advanced and I've grown older and many mature, going from being the youngest guy to having people working for Pine Tree State, the mentoring part is really fun. I could see myself active soured and lecturing in a campus environment at the end of my career. It would atomic number 4 a courteous way to relax after the fast pace of a startup environment, it would put me back into research and mentation.

The other English of this is I could go off and basically teach skiing and golf for six months of the yr. If you want the fantasise — that's Pine Tree State, playing the seniors tour in golf in the U.S.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/461001/10_questions_for_ping_identity_cto_patrick_harding.html

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