Why I code as a CTO

Flabbergasted to say the least. Dude do your job. Fix the process. Don't set a bad example.

> That's something you're willing to share out loud? Your company's technical process (which you're fully in control of, Mr. CTO) is so cumbersome that it seriously hinders your ability to execute

This is exactly what someone who can't be easily unseated should be doing at a company - demonstrate to middle management that the process they've constructed is whack and take away excuses for not delivering. CEO or someone else on the founding team should be doing that to sales, marketing, etc as well

The only title that a founder can have that matters more than "founder" is a CEO.

He calls himself a CTO, and that's fine, but he's really just a technical cofounder, and that's what he's acting like (and it sounds like it's a very positive thing for the company).

The CTO title and the whole point of the article are not really relevant, this entire situation would not be possible if he weren't a co-founder.

I think it is a good lesson that founders shouldn't necessarily be pigeon holed into roles they don't want, but the CTO title really has nothing to do with it.

This comment seemed the most reasonable of all of the first line comments so far.

You could event extend it farther by highlighting that many firms have a VP of Engineering AND a CTO.

In that scenario, the CTO tends to do more "strategic" and "big picture" work and the VPE is who runs the day to day work of managing SWEs, setting standards etc.

But even then, there are many different flavors of that too.

I found the article interesting, even given a large range of possible definitions of CTO.

I do wonder if it is possible to agree on a general definition of the CTO from the perspective of the job to be done, rather than how they do it.

For example, we could say the job of the CTO is to ensure the company remains technically competitive. If they do it by means of building an organization then so be it. If they rather do it by writing code themselves, then why not?

Again, implies there is such a thing as a "list of CTO responsibilities". Companies can decide to give their CTO x or y portfolio, but by the time a company reaches the point where titles matter, it's hard to think of an intrinsically "CTO" responsibility that isn't covered by a VP/E or VP/PM. The one thing I can think of is "organization-wide architecture oversight", which is a pretty toxic role to assign.

In orgs where the CTO does a bunch of stuff, I think it usually makes more sense to think of them as a VP/E with a different-shaped hat (or a VP/PM).

There's definitely an interesting article to write about the VP/E who still codes!

The role of CTO is more about accountability, responsibility and autonomy.

I try to minimize meetings to the minimum necessary to get everyone on the same page with what our next goal is. From there, I'm right there in the trenches with my team working to get these sprints done. sure, it sounds like a senior lead developer and if you're in a small startup, it kind of is. The CTO part comes in twofold, if the project is falling behind, its on me to figure out whats keeping us from hitting the dealing and resolving it. I've let people go who underperformed. Its also my job to see who's getting burned out and making sure they get some time off so that they can come back refreshed and ready to push again.

Ss far as promise of "equity," Im currnetly pretty happy that I maxed out equity at the beginning.

CTOs come in all shapes and forms

I'm a CTO that codes. I have zero reports.

We also have zero employees and relatively little revenue :-)

I think my role would indeed have to shift if we were to employ people and I don't like it, but I think you're not wrong.

It’s mostly because tech titles have no meaning without context (not specifically a tech thing either but we seem to do it more than most).

One place I was a senior dev running two teams of 8-9 devs (as both a line manager and a day to day manager plus mentoring), another I was a “Head of Software Engineering”, there where only 9 devs in the business, did get a nice pay bump with the ridiculous title though so that was nice.

The senior managing two teams thing came about because there was one senior per team and when the pandemic hit the manufacturing dev teams senior just upped and quit, I took over temporarily and then the pandemic lasted longer than anyone expected, it was a lead role even with one team and frankly at least a couple on each team should have been seniors on ability and experience but it was a weird org that way.

The article could also have been called something like “my job is to write code and I call myself CTO”. I don’t see a problem with that if it works for the org e.g. the business cofounder is CEO and the technical one is CTO and that’s the company.

It feels it bit disingenuous though to act like he’s breaking the mold and continuing to code when his day to day is higher level management stuff. It’s not quite the same as like Tobias Lutke still working on Ruby or something.

In their defence, I can see "no direct reports" perhaps referring more to the line managerial side than code responsibility.

However a few things stood out in this to me.

> So pushing new ideas is quite important because they require intentional, sustained effort. Between org structure, roadmap incentives, and limited risk budget, few engineers can take months to pursue ambiguous bets.

That's exactly the kind of thing a CTO should be fixing.

> A recent example: we kept talking about building an AI chat product for our customers. It was clearly valuable, but it felt like a daunting task, and no one on the team had the time and headspace to take it on given their existing commitments.

Why? It's one of the hottest tech trends. If you've got nobody who would jump on this given you're an AI company, did they have valid technical reservations?

If nobody had the space, why? You're a C-suite exec, saying something is clearly valuable, why can't you get someone to work on it for a few days?

This post is a job ad, but it screams of a disfunctional company to me. Why can't your other devs do this? Why do they not have the time or headspace? Why do they not have the safety of taking on ambiguous bets that the company itself thinks are sensible?

> Last month, we had a million dollar per year customer that came to us with a burning need: they needed full data redaction on one of our integrations for compliance reasons. Our team had considered potentially having the customer build their own integration on top of our API in order to get around this requirement, and scoping it out properly would have required many meetings across product, legal, and engineering. I built and shipped a working version in a day

There are two possible explanations (outside of "it's a lie"):

1. Your team has valid reasons that data redaction for compliance reasons isn't the sort of thing you should slap together in a day

2. You have massive customer need for features that take a day to ship and your company is so fucked it'll turn them into multi-departmental nightmare meetings for absolutely no reason

> We’re building AI-powered tools to transform customer support, and we need technical folks who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. If this sounds like your kind of environment, check out our open roles.

No thanks. Sounds like being CTO could be fun, coding-wise, and being a grunt elsewhere without the headspace or time to take on valuable tasks sounds pretty awful.

Broadly it sounds like someone else is the CTO and John gets the title because he's a cofounder and coding. But he's a software engineer. That's cool, enjoy that, you don't need to want to do larger scale strategy or anything else. But someone should do that job.

It seems possible that most CTOs are in tiny startups, don't have reports and we don't know about them because, having no reports, they don't get a lot of visibility compared to someone at the top of a 10,000 person org chart.

But the article framing is still odd. If the CTO has no reports who is going to do the coding other than the CTO? The reason the CTO is coding is because, being CTO, they want technical things to happen. He can't farm it off to his reports because they don't exist. Case closed. The real question is why doesn't he feel hiring some people to code is a good idea. 1 highly capable report could probably +30%, 40% his productivity.

With no directs, even “principal” would be a stretch in any company of note. If he spends that much time “coding”, that barely qualifies as a “senior” at large tech companies.

It's definitely not super uncommon where I'm at. CTOs, especially those that founded companies and are more technical doers than managers, that end up having responsibility for architecture and technical matters (tech lead deluxe), but no people (due to lack of people management and leadership skills/or desire for that kind of job - sometimes also product management skills at larger organizations).

Sounds more like a "distinguished engineer" ?

No it isn't. Lots of CTOs don't have reports.

“ how are you able to manage conflict between org builders and your technical vision?”

That for me, is the core of the issue. I have been in a few places where senior management (up to c level) still code and are critical parts of the project team.

The problem is who keeps them to schedules and co-ordination with the other people on the project. Hard to complain about team level issues if the failing person is also the boss of the technical staff.

Build a demo perhaps to illustrate the idea/vision but don’t code, focus on the high level management and direct the ICs to build out the production version.

Both roles (management and coding) are difficult, demanding positions to do well, deserving of respect and commitment.

Just my opinion after bad experiences.

A CTO with atrophied skills (or no hands-on technical skills in the first place) can be just as dangerous.

I always have wondered a bit, do people in other fields have this, too? Like do people expect the CMO at a pharmaceutical company to still be running clinical trials or whatever to, I dunno, maintain their street cred? Or is it just tech companies where people seem to have existential angst about managers doing manager instead of "technical" work?