[HN Gopher] Why I code as a CTO
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Why I code as a CTO
Author : johnjwang
Score : 290 points
Date : 2025-10-24 16:03 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.assembled.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.assembled.com)
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| You can be the chief officer of a 1 person organization, or a
| 100,000 organization. Or pick another dimension such as SLOC,
| number of projects/products, teams, DAU, etc.
|
| CTO has a different meaning at different levels of scale.
|
| With a headcount of around 250 employees, you can still work
| directly on implementation. But with a headcount of 100,000, it
| doesn't make sense.
| liqilin1567 wrote:
| I agree. As a company grows, the CTO must shift from coder to
| leader, architect, and culture-shaper.
| sarabande wrote:
| I really appreciated this blog post, John, to know that you're
| doing what I've been doing without a guilty conscience.
|
| I'm a VP eng/research at a startup and also feel like one of the
| few people apart from the founders who can push major technical
| initiatives by just doing it themselves, due to: business
| context, technical chops, architectural judgment, grit, and
| seniority to pull in cross-functional stakeholders to help out.
|
| However, I have often questioned if it is correct that so few
| people in the org can do this and if I shouldn't be enabling
| others to do it themselves instead.
|
| How have you been able to navigate not having any direct reports?
| Who does your engineering org report to and how are you able to
| manage conflict between org builders and your technical vision?
| stoneman24 wrote:
| " 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.
| t-writescode wrote:
| You have no direct reports. That's the difference. You're
| effectively the solo Fellow level engineer at the company,
| driving the largest tech decisions based on time spent in code;
| and you're doing your job well by familiarizing yourself with all
| parts of the code, including areas that need bug fixes.
|
| This is not the same as an SDM or Director or people with lots of
| reports. It's mostly the "having reports" part that causes devs
| to reduce or stop coding, since managing and project leadership
| are whole jobs.
| tptacek wrote:
| Articles like these are kind of hard to parse because there's no
| well-defined meaning to the title of "CTO". Our "CTO" codes,
| probably more than anybody in the company, but that's because
| he's got a founder-inherited CTO title that mostly just means "he
| can do whatever he wants" --- we're happy with that, what he
| wants is practically always great.
|
| That's one definition of a CTO. Another CTO type is the opposite:
| "the thing you call an engineering founder when they've done so
| much customer-facing work that you have to take their commit bit
| away from them". This is, I think, an even more common archetype
| than the other one.
|
| Then you have the toxic CTO definitions --- CTO as "ultimate
| decision maker for engineering", or, God help you, CTO as
| "executive manager of all of engineering".
|
| You'd have to be specific about what kind of CTO you are to
| really make the question of why you code interesting.
| sarabande wrote:
| 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?
| peter422 wrote:
| 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.
| alexpotato wrote:
| 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.
| lbreakjai wrote:
| I once worked for company with C-level guys working alongside
| the rank and file. Smartest guys I knew, EE degrees with
| honours from Cambridge. So smart that they knew their strength,
| and decided to let better people manage the company they
| created.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| > because there's no well-defined meaning to the title of
| "CTO". Our "CTO" codes,
|
| Amen.
|
| I am a CTO, but spend most of my day coding. I was brought onto
| a smallish/medium sized company to get their base tech into the
| modern age, build LOB apps to improve some workflows, and
| ultimate build a new EMR in that space to replace the one the
| company is using.
|
| I don't have anybody that reports to me. I'm one of 2 tech
| people in a company of clinicians and doctors. There is no
| budgeting or reports I have to generate.
|
| But, it was the only title that made sense given my role in
| that specific company.
|
| Anytime someone asks me I always have to add "but I don't
| really do CTO things".
| swat535 wrote:
| You can say this about any "C" title, such as the CEO who is
| spending his time in Figma or marketing or sales,...
|
| In small startups, people wear multiple hats due to resource
| constraints. Executive roles and responsibilities change when
| the company grows.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Then why even mention the CTO part?
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| Because it's the official title at my company?
| dijksterhuis wrote:
| you are what you do
|
| > I am a CTO
|
| > "but I don't really do CTO things"
|
| so you're not a CTO according to your own definition of what
| a CTO does then.
|
| my previous employment i was "lead engineer". i got to pick
| that title. had a 1 day per week part timer reporting to me.
| similar company description. making technical decisions.
| strategy meetings with CEO and founder etc.
|
| i was not a lead engineer and ive since changed my linkedin
| page/cv to just say "engineer". who or what was i leading? a
| contractor in ukraine who did work for us one day a week?
| nah, need a team (ie more than 1) to be able to lead.
|
| do the brave thing and call bullshit on yourself. this is
| something good leaders do.
| tptacek wrote:
| People here want "CTOs" to be brave enough to call bullshit
| on their "CTO-hood" but nobody here is brave enough to call
| bullshit on the title itself, which is the truer and more
| important observation.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| What's the purity test for being a "real" CTO?
| tptacek wrote:
| Like I keep saying, I don't think there's any such thing.
| The title by itself has the same kind of meaning as
| "employee of the month".
| kgwxd wrote:
| When anyone mentions having the title CTO, it's guaranteed what
| follows will be also be pretentious BS.
| thom wrote:
| I think this captures the technical track dual to CEO 'founder
| mode'. As cringeworthy as many found that term, it captures the
| plain truth that there are certain types of changes that only
| people at the top are (or at least feel) empowered to make in an
| organisation's structure or processes. A CTO can choose to ship
| substantial, opinionated pieces of software that wouldn't (at
| least quickly) emerge from lower level teams. Arguably the best
| way to communicate a radical design is working code. That said, I
| do think the degree to which a company can push down this sort of
| constitutional power is a good measure of long term
| organisational health.
| ecshafer wrote:
| > I currently manage no direct reports and ship a lot of code.
| Not in an "I dabble when I have free time in between meetings"
| way, but in an "I shipped multiple substantial features last
| quarter" way
|
| Very loose definition of a CTO.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Possibly unpopular, but this is an interesting topic, so I'll
| post my counterpoint.
|
| The question is: what are you not doing that is in the list of
| CTO responsibilities because you're coding? One of the reasons
| stated why you do this is "because you enjoy it", and on the list
| of reasons you need to do it is there are only a handful of
| people in the org that can ship new product surface area.
| That's...concerning. That seems like the kind of thing the CTO
| would want to fix, but I don't think having the CTO be the one to
| ship that surface area is highest-leverage use of time. If I'm
| reading this right, it's essentially that "because of the virtue
| of my position and autonomy, I can work on experimental projects
| for months at a time, but I don't empower my teams to do the
| same."
|
| I have direct experience with this sort of attitude at companies
| between 200-400 people, and the messaging from top brass was
| framed as "innovation cannot be democratized". After seeing it in
| action for several years, I think it's a poor model. CTOs are
| technical visionaries, but coding is not a high-leverage
| activity. Good startup CTOs need to change their role multiple
| times over the course of the life of a company, and failing to
| understand the profound impact you can have as a leader is a
| common pitfall, because it doesn't fit with what you enjoy, or
| often what you have experience with. In the case of Assembled,
| Crunchbase says between 100-250 employees. If you get more
| towards 500-1000, I would seriously recommend you re-evaluate
| your thinking on coding as CTO, at least to the degree you are
| today.
|
| One technical question: do you find yourself developing the MVP
| of a particular feature to "get water through the pipes" and then
| handing that off to some other team to get it to "production
| ready"? What happens when you don't have time to land the long-
| term experiment before you need to turn to the next concern? I
| ask these questions because they are the points where I've seen
| this system fail, and I'm curious if that has every been an issue
| for you.
| tptacek wrote:
| 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!
| dnw wrote:
| Exactly. Role and title are amorphous and depends on the
| industry, stage of the company, etc.
|
| Look at this CEO who codes: https://github.com/lattner :-)
| (He was fund raising in July, August)
| dahart wrote:
| > The one thing I can think of is "organization-wide
| architecture oversight", which is a pretty toxic role to
| assign.
|
| I don't know that I understand what you mean by toxic or why,
| but I've only ever seen the architecture overseer kind of
| thing in pretty small companies. In big companies, where
| there are multiple VPs of engineering and product management,
| that feels like the only time CTO even makes sense, and I
| expect they need to be setting vision and deciding where to
| invest (i.e. setting budgets) sometimes handling legal
| issues. In such large companies I've never seen a CTO
| providing architecture oversight, let alone coding. They
| might mandate the use or avoidance of some tech for reasons
| of corporate politics, but they are never in the trenches.
|
| Having been a founding engineer in a startup where I was
| called CTO and mostly wrote code, I feel like this is a
| 'cute' thing we do, using C-level role names for everyone in
| a 3 person company. I didn't feel like a real CTO, or VP, and
| I feel like using C-level names for roles in startups and
| small companies is a little goofy and awkward. A lot of
| people seem to like inflated role titles, and VCs seem to
| like having someone in key roles who can both lead well and
| take all responsibility and blame. I feel like ideally the
| name CTO shouldn't be used until it's needed, which isn't
| until there are enough devs to need managers, and enough
| managers to need VPs and enough VPs to need a CTO. If that
| were the case, then the possible things on the list of CTO
| responsibilities is a lot smaller and more definable than if
| we say CTO can be anything including the 2nd founder who's
| more interested in coding than pitching or marketing.
| tptacek wrote:
| Think about what it says, in a larger team staffed with
| competent technical talent, to have a single person across
| all of it reconciling decisions with their own personal
| mental model. I think it's an attractive idea for a lot of
| aspirants! Who wouldn't want to be President of Code? But
| ambiguity is resolved by practitioners at the sharp end of
| the system.
| dahart wrote:
| I see, and I agree completely. I don't see the CTO as
| having that role, but you're right I guess some people
| do. That's one reason it makes sense to at least try to
| put some definition to the role, isn't it? To help people
| realize it's not a technical role, but a
| people/organizational role that generally only large
| organizations need...
| emilsoman wrote:
| > do you find yourself developing the MVP of a particular
| feature to "get water through the pipes" and then handing that
| off to some other team to get it to "production ready"?
|
| I liked your take and curious to know what you think a CTO
| should be doing here
| brabel wrote:
| So many things wrong with this sort of "CTO must not do what
| they enjoy but what is the list of responsibilities " robotic
| thinking. So you think coding is not high leverage on a tech
| company. Do you even remember why your company exists anymore?
| Surely not to give people a living and let them be happy at
| work, according to you. Absolutely no, the only purpose of a
| company is to deliver value, but I bet you can't even define
| value other than a hand wavy impact on ROI or whatever makes
| this quarter's numbers look good.
|
| In any company, only a small number of developers can ship a
| difficult feature within a reasonable time frame, and that will
| almost always include the CTO if they were a founder and
| probably wrote half of the code. Only many years of experience
| working on a particular code base will give you that so no
| matter what you do, it may be years for someone else to get to
| the same level and that may never happen because the product
| just grew so large no one can do that anymore. If a CTO is
| still in the position to ship a large feature in a day , you
| are having an extremely hard time arguing they still should not
| do that. What could be more valuable use of a day in their
| schedule? Meeting with the CEO to discuss KPIs?? Fuck that.
|
| This hits close to home as you might have realized. But yes I
| am all for letting the c-level go back to the trenches once in
| a while to feel what the salaried guys are facing. They can't
| fix things just based on third party accounts anyway.
| matwood wrote:
| > So you think coding is not high leverage on a tech company.
|
| At the CTO level of a growing company it is one of the lower
| leverage things they can do. Setting technical direction,
| hiring the right people, and putting the right people in
| positions of power will all have much more impact than
| writing some code on the weekend.
| brabel wrote:
| You're wrong man. These things you mentioned happen rarely,
| it's not what you do day to day. If you don't do some high
| value coding you have no clue how to steer a tech company
| at a technical level.
| BoxFour wrote:
| > it's not what you do day to day.
|
| I don't know about that. I was a "CTO" for a small
| (10-person) and a slightly larger (around 100-person) VC-
| backed startup. Hiring was always top of mind at both
| places. Not even "people management", just hiring alone.
| I'm not saying this universal, but when a company is
| expected to scale rapidly (as is often the case with
| venture-backed firms), managing people can easily consume
| your entire workday even at a relatively small size
| company.
|
| Of course, I'm not saying that's everyone's experience.
| There are obviously lots of reasons that dynamic might be
| different: For example if you're not a VC-backed company,
| or a CTO who's a world-renowned technical expert in a
| particular field (nobody's bringing Ilya on board for his
| ability to hire).
|
| But it's very, very easy for people management to be a
| day-to-day thing and I don't think it's a waste of time
| compared to direct contributions.
| icedchai wrote:
| As a former "CTO" at a small company and an early stage
| employee at several others, hiring was a ton of work for
| everyone. It was honestly the hardest thing I had to do.
| However, it was by no means a constant, day-to-day thing.
| BoxFour wrote:
| More power to you - I easily spent weeks at a times
| sifting through resumes and interviewing, and even once
| someone was hired making sure they were onboarding well
| and feeling well-supported and etc.
|
| By the time everything was humming along we were either
| raising a new round (and thus hiring more), or someone
| was leaving and we had to refill that role.
| rpdillon wrote:
| I think me mentioning a list of responsibilities sort of
| derailed the conversation a little bit.
|
| It's not about them avoiding what they enjoy. It's about
| empowering and scaling a human organization to take on larger
| and larger scope over time. And at a technical company, the
| CTO is uniquely positioned to understand organizational
| scalability and technical scalability. So the risk I see with
| a CTO that focuses predominantly on coding is that they may
| be neglecting higher impact work that they could be doing
| that would set the organization up to empower more people to
| do the kind of work that they think is necessary.
|
| The other risk I observed with a CTO that predominantly codes
| is that they become a bottleneck and are not actually able to
| ship the really experimental and product-altering features
| that they envision, and so they end up handing off
| essentially half-done ideas to teams who are then responsible
| for picking up the half-done mess and getting it to something
| that's suitable for production. I think this is probably
| avoidable in some way, but I do think it's an intrinsic risk
| of taking on large projects as a single coder while having
| other responsibilities to the company.
| willio58 wrote:
| > I currently manage no direct reports and ship a lot of code.
|
| This is a wildly different status than almost all other people
| with this title.
|
| I'm glad this person still likes coding, and they seem to be
| great at it, but this role doesn't match up to the title. This
| doesn't really matter until he wants to switch jobs and realizes
| near zero CTO positions outside of this one company will require
| few meetings and zero management. He'd have to change title to
| principal engineer or something but an article titled "Why I code
| as a Principal Engineer" doesn't quite grab attention the same
| way.
| tptacek wrote:
| No it isn't. Lots of CTOs don't have reports.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| really? like who?
| tptacek wrote:
| Both in my own personal direct experience and in 15 years
| of consulting, primarily for tech startups, the modal CTO I
| encountered had in reality a product manager role with a
| special title that was helpful in important pre-sales
| meetings --- and they did not tend to be the de facto
| VP/PM.
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| what's the most effective model you've seen?
| tptacek wrote:
| I think CTO as "other, better-defined kind of exec, but
| with a funny hat" is a perfectly cromulent model. I think
| CTO as "PM that customers feel flattered to talk to" is
| another perfectly cromulent model. To me, "CTO" is almost
| an honorific, or like a title of nobility.
| Cpoll wrote:
| I've been at several companies that have a CTO and a
| Director of Engineering. The CTO sets the strategy, and the
| Director of Engineering handles the execution. In theory
| the Director "reports" to the CTO (I.e. is under in the org
| chart), but not necessarily. Sometimes the Director reports
| to the CEO, and/or takes a more collaborative role with the
| CTO.
| tptacek wrote:
| This does not apply at my current company, where the CTO
| has their title as an artifact of how the founding team
| was structured, but if I was founder/early at a company,
| progressed to a senior role, and then was told that I
| should take a role where I "set engineering strategy", I
| would immediately conclude that I was being managed out.
| "Strategy", in particular, is the kiss of death.
| dijit wrote:
| I have a terribly hard time understanding the effectiveness
| of a CTO who has no reports, especially in a technology
| company.
| tptacek wrote:
| What is it that you think a CTO does? There isn't a
| standard answer to this question.
| kjgkjhfkjf wrote:
| CTO is usually the exec responsible for the entire tech
| org. The CTO reports to the CEO, and the top managers and
| maybe a few ICs in the tech org report to the CTO.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| It's very common to see a VP of Engineering managing the
| day-to-day operations while the CTO acts in a capacity
| like this.
| dijit wrote:
| I've seen that too, but then the VP of Engineering tends
| to report to the CTO, and not to- say, the CEO directly.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| Dotted line reporting is very different. In these
| instances the VP/E is usually directly interfacing with
| other executives as the CTO's peer. This is even more
| true when the budget is managed by the VP/E and the CTO
| is more customer/sales facing.
| tptacek wrote:
| You're saying "usually" about something that has
| definitely not been a norm in my career. It seems like
| there's really only two ways to interpret that
| arrangement: either the CTO is in fact the EVP/E (fair
| enough! lots of CTOs are other exec roles with a funny
| hat), or the CTO has _a single top-level manager report_
| , in which case what really happened is that the org
| hired a pro to run engineering and put the "CTO" out to
| pasture.
| icedchai wrote:
| I was CTO of a <20 person startup. I recruited the entire
| tech team, collaborated with the CEO to build the product
| backlog and spec things out, presented to investors, but
| also had at least 50% time to code. Not all "CTO" roles
| are the same. At a small company they better be hands on.
| tptacek wrote:
| This is very similar to my own role, but I didn't have
| (nor would I have accepted) that title.
| icedchai wrote:
| On my resume, I usually list it as "Lead Engineer" since
| it fits the roles I'm applying to better.
| tptacek wrote:
| I think a founder/early gets away with "CTO" on their
| resume, esp. if they're the only person in the org with
| the role (ie: it's a PM-style CTO, and there isn't a
| VP/PM; or: it's a VP/E-style CTO, and there isn't a
| VP/E). But outside that circumstance, given the choice,
| I'd rather have the VP/PM or VP/E role than "CTO".
|
| (As we get deeper into these threads I am further out on
| a limb.)
| stackedinserter wrote:
| CTO without reports is just a "developer".
| cjblomqvist wrote:
| 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).
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| 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.
| Thorrez wrote:
| There are plenty of Principal Engineers (L8) at Google who
| have no reports. In fact, I think the majority have no
| reports.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Let me clarify. I know there are principals with no
| directs. I'm more calling out that the "scope" of a
| principal is a high bar at Big Tech and if he is spending
| all of his time coding at a startup, I doubt that he is
| working at the level of a principal at BigTech.
|
| My own anecdote is that the level of work I was doing as an
| "architect" at a 60 person startup where I was the second
| technical hire when the new CTO was hired to bring tech
| leadership in house from a third party consulting company
| mapped to a mid level L5 consultant at AWS ProServe (to be
| fair I only had two and a half years of AWS experience at
| the time I was hired by AWS) and now while I'm a "Staff
| consultant" at a third party AWS consulting firm with
| around 1000 people, looking at the leveling guidelines and
| expectations at my current company, AWS and GCP, it maps to
| a "senior"
| BoxFour wrote:
| Most of those engineers, outside of ones who have extremely
| specialized knowledge or skills, are essentially managing
| others still just without a direct reporting chain.
|
| The commit log for most of these high-level engineers is
| extremely sparse. They're spending most of their time
| writing documents or influencing orgs, not writing code.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Yeah 60% coding 40% managing juniors is basically what senior
| dev has looked like me for the past few jobs, even at smaller
| (~15-30 employees) outfits
| willseth wrote:
| This is staff, principal, or even EM scope at many orgs. I
| have never seen anyone with a senior dev title directly
| managing juniors.
| roenxi wrote:
| 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.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Sounds more like a "distinguished engineer" ?
| mobeigi wrote:
| Exactly. Most CTO's have tens if not hundreds of direct reports
| that rely on them regularly. Which is why their time must be
| used to support them leaving absolutely 0 time to do PR code
| contributions on the side (unless you work weekends).
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Not much is worse than working somewhere that a higher up is
| squatting a job title that they don't want to do. It just
| causes a dysfunctional lord of the flies situation where lower
| people fight for the reigns to get what they want.
| xpasky wrote:
| My journey has been quite similar (just a few more years of
| "unhappy John") and this approach is now very close to what I
| practice. I do have a few reports and run the R&D leadership
| team, I delegate as much as I can to my directors. (Besides being
| hands on where the organization needs it, I still regard the
| other part of my job to keep our org accountable, engineers
| inspired, and keeping the big picture in.)
|
| For people who doubt this, I recommend "How to Build a Car" by
| Adrian Newey (CTO of Redbull Racing).
|
| But to be clear - if you do coding as CTO only because "only you
| can run certain projects," part of your job should be to fix that
| first. You will still have the easiest time doing it, but you
| should always have (many) others in position to run innovation
| projects, work with customers etc.
| herval wrote:
| I worked with plenty of founders like this - they carry a C level
| title, but never stop being just an engineer or sales guy or
| designer.
|
| That's all fine when you have no employees - C titles are
| bullshit when it's just two bros in a dorm - but it invariably
| hurts the company prospects as the team grows.
|
| The common hack is hiring a "VP of Eng" to take care of the
| actual C-level work.
|
| Mind you, there's absolutely nothing wrong in wanting to be the
| guy who sits in a corner and codes. Just don't call it
| "leadership" or "chief" anything, since you're sitting in a role
| and not acting the part.
| aidos wrote:
| Question for people who have gone through the journey of being
| tech founders that have grown a company. At what size of org /
| engineering team would you expect the founder to not code at all
| anymore?
|
| Edit: relatedly - at what size do you need a cto?
| tptacek wrote:
| It depends on what that founder wanted to do! Lots of founders
| code for the whole ride.
| rubenvanwyk wrote:
| If you don't have direct reports, why are you "CTO" and not
| founding or principal engineer?
| bongodongobob wrote:
| This is just title inflation. If this is what you're doing,
| you're not a CTO or you're not doing your job properly.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| I have a hard time taking someone with the title of "CTO"
| seriously if they have no reports and have time to code instead
| of being concerned with strategy.
|
| I've had a few "opportunities" to be a "CTO" that were really no
| more than a glorified, underpaid senior developer with the
| promise of "equity" that would probably be meaningless
| noir_lord wrote:
| 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.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| People find it strange when I interview candidates, I don't
| even look at resumes. I don't need to. I ask questions to
| measure among other things the size and complexity of
| projects they were responsible for, the level of complexity,
| and what they actually accomplished.
|
| If he came in and call himself a "CTO" and then he described
| his day to day work, that would be a red flag for me.
| hdjrudni wrote:
| 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.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| The self burn is the best burn.
|
| But yes, I've been a CTO with a zero reports and doing
| everything while working in a company with > 200 employs. And
| while revenue was fine %he payment was shit.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| 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
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| And if when you sat for a behavioral interview at a company
| of any size and they leveled you based on "scope" and
| "impact", you would be leveled as a senior engineer or a team
| lead.
|
| And the "two parts" of your responsibility were those of
| senior/lead devs at the last 60 person company I worked for
| in 2020.
|
| Equity in private companies is statistically meaningless and
| will be worthless. I'm at a point in my career where I only
| care about cash and RSUs in public companies that I can
| easily sell when they vest
| andy99 wrote:
| 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.
| IanCal wrote:
| 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.
| matwood wrote:
| > 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?
|
| As a leader, especially a CxO, the most important job they
| have is the allocation of resources. It was clearly NOT
| valuable if they couldn't apply any developer time towards
| it.
| brabel wrote:
| How do you concern about strategy all day? Just sit down and
| think about it?
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Lots of conversations/meetings. Your job is to know what is
| happening and strategize accordingly.
| matwood wrote:
| You read, talk to people and write. Then you get feedback on
| your writing, and repeat the process.
| motorest wrote:
| > How do you concern about strategy all day? Just sit down
| and think about it?
|
| I'm not OP, but whenever your product is implemented by more
| than one team you will also have the need to coordinate and
| set strategic goals as well as accompany and steer each team
| towards where it's infrastructure/tech stack/systems
| architecture need to be.
|
| If you do not offer guidance and determine technical
| directions, each engineer working in each team will happily
| fill the void and do their best to scratch their itch at the
| expense of the whole company becoming an unmaintainable big
| ball of mud.
|
| Let's put things differently: what do you expect will be the
| output of a company if no one is responsible for things like
| directing the company's R&D effort, coordinate and specify
| the company's tech roadmap, even oversee product development.
| prmoustache wrote:
| you read gartner's publication and blindly ask AI to copy
| paste that info in a memo or powerpoint to pass it on to the
| middle management without trying to figure out if it makes
| sense.
|
| At least that is how it looks from the engineers perspective.
| secondcoming wrote:
| It's amazing that this guy can deliver so much despite only
| typing with one hand.
| notpachet wrote:
| This made me laugh. Take my upvote.
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| I am the CTO of zero employees and I code all day.
| gbransgrove wrote:
| Okay, I just have one main question and a follow up. Who _is_ at
| the wheel of your tech and engineering strategy then? And is
| staying across everything to make good informed decisions in that
| space not enough to be a full time job by itself? I can
| understand some coding can be a good input for deciding strategy
| but not as described in the article.
| firefoxd wrote:
| At the time, our company had ~500 employees. The CTO would write
| code, and it would get merged almost immediately, he would brag
| about it in meetings. We would then quietly modify it to the
| point of it being unrecognizable.
|
| Example: we talked about upgrading our scraper because it was
| getting blocked quite frequently. The CTO wrote a brand new one
| that was supposed to be much smarter than what we had in place.
| The only problem was, he wrote a python script. This was a php
| application. Yeah, it was merged, it never ran because, well it
| was python. We fixed some of the flaws in our scraper and reduced
| the block rate. The CTO saved the day...
| submeta wrote:
| I have a question to the CTOs here, honestly asking: How can you
| have your team work on cutting edge technology without
| understanding the technology by getting your hands dirty, open
| your terminal, tinker with the technology, look into it, play
| with it, try to get a grasp of it. How?
| kittikitti wrote:
| The backlash is really telling of how bad things have gotten
| when a Chief Technology Officer coding in a software startup is
| disqualifying.
| hooverd wrote:
| Maybe Staff Engineer would be a better title here. He doesn't
| seem to be doing much in the way of ya know, managing or
| running things.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Unfortunately this meme that CTO and other members of executive
| team only supposed to be doing "thought leadership" is really
| pervasive now
| BoxFour wrote:
| I don't think this is a really convincing argument: There are
| plenty of leaders who haven't "done the job" in decades, and we
| don't question that. It's incredibly common in professional
| sports, for example.
|
| Mike McCarthy hasn't played a down of American football in 40
| years, and never played at a very high level. But we don't
| question his ability to get others to perform complex motions.
| submeta wrote:
| This is not really a good analogy. Tech is different.
|
| I am not saying you should sit down and write code. But in IT
| you know the difference between a tech lead who knows
| technology, who knows what works, for what reason. And the
| one that just demands results but knows nothing about the
| details of the technology. Has never gotten his hands on it.
| BoxFour wrote:
| > This is not really a good analogy. Tech is different.
|
| Why? Seriously: Give me a convincing reason why tech is
| different from every other field, where this happens
| regularly.
|
| > I am not saying you should sit down and write code.
|
| But that's the whole premise of this conversation. It's
| entirely possible to understand something deeply without
| doing the thing yourself.
|
| It's entirely possible for a CTO to deeply understand
| technology without writing any code themselves, opening up
| a terminal, tinkering with anything, or even what
| individual contributors are doing day-to-day. I would
| actually say that's the hallmark of a _good_ CTO.
| submeta wrote:
| Because one is an intellectual activity, the other is
| not. You cannot expect the 60+ year old coach to run and
| train with the team members. But you can as a CTO try out
| technology, open the terminal, run a docker container to
| see the technology. Otherwise you are too far away from
| the things you try to orchestrate. Here the analogy of a
| master chef comes to mind. She doesn't have to work with
| her sous-chefs, but it helps to be able to still master
| the knife, make sushi or make a Creme brulee, or even an
| omelette. All while mostly focusing on the big picture.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Is it common for a CTO to not have any direct reports?
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Yes, usually company hires someone with a title of "vp of eng"
| or similar and have them do hr-mandated "people management".
| CTO is then freed up to do strategy and whatever else and
| he/she typically has the power to organize work outside of
| official reporting chain anyway. Not saying I'm a fan of this
| arrangement but it's pretty common and not the worst way to
| handle things.
| dahart wrote:
| In my experience, yes in startups, and no in large
| corporations.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| If your job functions leave you time to code you probably
| shouldn't have the title of CTO.
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| A CTO with atrophied skills (or no hands-on technical skills in
| the first place) can be just as dangerous.
| theptip wrote:
| I think the linked https://blog.gregbrockman.com/figuring-out-
| the-cto-role-at-s... is much more interesting, it gives more
| actionable detail and advice.
|
| As Brockman says, you need a very strong VP Eng to make this
| possible.
|
| It's an important milestone for the technical founder(s) to
| decide if they are going to hang up their spurs and become a
| manager/leader, or keep doing the technical work. (A common
| failure mode is trying to do both.)
| iheartrms wrote:
| I've always wondered: Why did we switch to "code" instead of
| "program"?
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _People assume CTOs who code are either working on pet projects
| that never ship or doing ceremonial code reviews._
|
| people don't think that. people think CTOs who code may not be
| doing the leadership, managerial, or biz dev aspects of their
| job, or something like, why is he called CTO and not "engineer"
| or "architect" or "lead"?
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| 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?
| dilyevsky wrote:
| This is a series B company not an international
| pharmaceutical conglomerate. Perfectly reasonable for a CTO
| to participate in engineering work at this stage. I've
| experienced a few early companies where CTO just did meetings
| or that didn't have someone within the leadership team who
| dug into engineering at all and it wasn't pretty...
| icedchai wrote:
| I've experienced small companies that "scaled" their org
| and added unnecessary layers of management "because we're
| going to need it sooner than later." They never needed it.
| The leaders were out of touch with what was actually
| happening. Complete dysfunction ensued...
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Man, if I'm trying to decide which company to work for, and I see
| a blog post from its CTO crowing about regularly checking in code
| on Saturdays and Sundays, I'd start backing slowly away. And when
| I got to the bit that said "AI has made me three times as
| productive," I'd turn and run.
|
| Your job at the top is, more than anything else, pushing down a
| healthy culture. That includes things like setting an example of
| not working through the weekend. If you're doing it, your reports
| and their reports will feel the need to do it, too. Don't. And if
| you do anyway, certainly don't brag about it!
|
| And then listen to this insanity:
|
| > 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. It wasn't perfect, but it
| solved their immediate problem and preserved goodwill with the
| customer.
|
| 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,
| but, being above that process, you personally choose to
| circumvent it, foregoing required legal or engineering reviews,
| and shipping it immediately to your critically important
| customer? If one of the engineers who worked under you did that,
| you'd probably have fired him.
| ctxc wrote:
| Flabbergasted to say the least. Dude do your job. Fix the
| process. Don't set a bad example.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| > 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
| OccamsMirror wrote:
| Cowboy development might fly in an early stage startup. But
| are you even really a CTO or are you just an overpaid mid-
| level developer?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Just this. CTO title doesn't even make sense until your org
| is large enough that engineering vision and strategy
| becomes decoupled from execution.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| I think the answer is in the blog:
|
| " _I currently manage no direct reports and ship a lot of
| code._ "
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That's not a role that I'd normally associate with
| "Chief" anything (which, by definition, means direct
| reports). More like Principal Engineer, or Architect.
|
| In smaller companies, this is probably fairly normal, but
| you can't maintain this, as the company grows.
|
| I had a similar path, in my career. I originally started
| as a regular engineer, in a two-person team, and
| eventually ended up managing a small team of up to ten
| engineers.
|
| Towards the end, I couldn't write any code (for the
| company), at all. I still needed to code, but did so, for
| volunteer/open-source stuff. I think it made me a better
| technical leader (I had an employment contract without a
| clause that interfered with outside coding).
|
| I remember wanting to take an iOS training course, but
| the company wouldn't support it, so I took vacation, and
| went on my own dime. I never regretted it, but it was
| discouraging.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| The happy medium that the CTO did at the company where I
| worked where I was the architect guiding the technical
| direction, he would do non production level experimental
| coding as research - integrations with third party APIs,
| see if an AWS service was suitable - to take some of the
| load off of me hand the code over to me and I cleaned it
| up and made it production ready and championed it to the
| rest of the teams.
|
| He still helped accelerate efforts, got his coding fix
| when he had time, wasn't in the critical path of any
| work, and he made the entire org better.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Isn't this the fun part?
| taneq wrote:
| That's not a CTO, that's a dev.
|
| I was about to ask how someone in the C suite has time to
| code at all, ever, but here we are.
| prerok wrote:
| Trouble is, I don't think they'll just get it and then set
| about to changing the processes. Besides, the process doesn't
| come from the middle management, it originates from the top,
| usually the CTO.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Unless you're at a very small company, CTOs set technical
| vision, choose high level tooling strategy and outline
| engineering culture in broad strokes, but the nitty gritty
| of process will be from an engineering director or other
| role below the CTO. The CTO will probably provide feedback
| if needed, but they're not in the weeds and won't be able
| to see problems unless they're raised.
| prerok wrote:
| You are correct, my post was more for the situation where
| the CTO is also the engineering director but in larger
| orgs that is not usually so.
|
| I do think, however, that the coding CTO is not the way
| to go about to change the process. If it's too
| cumbersome, the CTO should talk with engineering director
| to find a way to make it less so, not just bypass the
| process.
| fooster wrote:
| Surely there is room for both. Most people don't found
| companies because they want to sit around on their ass.
| They're typically driven and do'ers. If things are not
| working as they want, and folks are not being responsive
| enough... they'll do it themselves and that is ok. After
| all THEY founded the company.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > If things are not working as they want, and folks are
| not being responsive enough... they'll do it themselves
| and that is ok.
|
| If the CTO has rank then why not work to solve the
| unresponsiveness or undesirable things?
|
| If someone--even a founder--can act as a loose cannon
| then there is a risk that they'll introduce problems like
| instability, security vulnerabilities, or unnecessary
| conflict or resentment. Compliance programs like SOC and
| PCI don't look fondly on staff bypassing SDLC processes
| because of those risks.
| whstl wrote:
| Exactly. Why change a process when you can be a superstar
| by ignoring it?
|
| Fuck the customers, fuck the employees, fuck the investors.
| My ego is more important than any of this.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Well if they dont and you have to demonstrate that again
| and again, then you know what to do and hopefully have the
| power to do it.
|
| > Besides, the process doesn't come from the middle
| management, it originates from the top, usually the CTO.
|
| Not ime
| wiseowise wrote:
| You need to exercise your god given right to mog goons below
| you.
|
| Show everyone that system (that you've created) is shit and
| when some lowly SE thinks he's above them all, you publicly
| flay him and make example for all that you're the god
| emperor.
|
| Business value? The ego trip is a business value!
| dilyevsky wrote:
| God forbid you'd actually have to do any real work when
| there's so many design, retro, and daily sync meetings to
| attend and so many jira issues to groom.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Ive worked on both ends of the spectrum and id prefer too
| much process to too little
|
| With too little process, people release bugs that I then
| have to scramble to fix. The CEO who pushed to skip QA
| and unit testing and everything in the name of release
| never has to deal with the consequences of their
| impatience
| zdragnar wrote:
| That same CEO would likely also push to have all of the
| things including no bugs, then complain people aren't
| productive enough when arbitrary and unrealistic
| deadlines aren't met.
|
| Source: my personal experience. Very few of the managers
| who can code that I've worked with were better than any
| of the ones who couldn't, and those who did actively code
| while managing were universally worse.
| ambicapter wrote:
| You're conveniently skipping over the fact that he has
| full control over those things. He is the CHIEF
| Technology Officer.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Only indirectly (through management) and still having
| control is exactly my point. Obviously if you need to do
| that over and over there're some other actions need to be
| taken
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > This is exactly what someone who can't be easily unseated
| should be doing at a company
|
| I mean yeah, but hes the fucking CTO. If hes the CTO, _he_ is
| responsible for that process. Its his job to evolve it to
| make it fit for purpose.
|
| What he's done is basically created a whole bunch of process
| debt, which is much harder to correct than tech debt.
| jumploops wrote:
| > regularly checking in code on Saturdays and Sundays
|
| If you're working on insurance SaaS, I agree.
|
| If you're building hard tech, I'd disagree entirely.
| stuffn wrote:
| Frankly if you're a CTO you aren't incentivized by a salary. It
| makes sense in this case no different than you'd code on the
| weekends for your side hustle.
|
| It only doesn't make sense when this jackass thinks the
| salaried engineer needs this "grit".
|
| C-levels aren't supposed to be "model employees". The incentive
| structure is wildly weighted in their favor. Instead you should
| ask them to understand the difference, which is asking a lot of
| these sociopaths, but I digress.
| brabel wrote:
| So in your view c-level are all sociopaths? Let me guess you
| are not c-level. Or maybe you are but you're the exception to
| the rule.
| immibis wrote:
| Hasn't it been repeatedly shown that C-level positions
| select for sociopaths?
| manquer wrote:
| I code as a founder/CTO on weekends, I don't expect weekend
| work done by anyone else and most people rarely check in if
| ever on weekends.
|
| The job profile of founder-CTO has not a lot of overlap with
| that of an individual contributor to be leading by example, the
| overlap is quite narrow even for senior engineering leadership.
|
| Until recently[3] leaders with prior coding skills were always
| discouraged from code contributions and focus on management
| exclusively, for all the reasons some of them you describe.
|
| --
|
| I usually say that I am a part-time coder, not a professional
| one, and caution not to look at what I do as a benchmark or
| signal.
|
| Vast majority of the code I write are DevEx or QoL for internal
| teams[4], or refactor tech debt that no one has time to deal
| with. Even mid-stage startups may not be large enough to invest
| in dedicated teams for this type of work.
|
| Occasionally I have written such integrations like OP[1]. It is
| typically a PoC for a demo, never a production one to actual
| customers. It would be unfair (and failure prone) to expect
| anyone else to start supporting a production integration
| without the full tooling or documentation.
|
| --
|
| I agree it is a fine-line and you can err on the wrong side of
| it. It is easy and tempting to start focusing on production
| code and lose focus of the core job, but so many decisions as a
| founder are like that. I am hardly the best or optimal founder-
| CTO. However the value of being close to the metal is important
| and worth some risk in early to mid stage startups.
|
| Perhaps there is also value in a CTO who understands what
| individual contributors are doing and is able to be more
| realistic about outcomes instead of being purely few layers
| above and not clued in.
|
| --
|
| [1] Not skipping legal that seems ridiculous, even if I wanted
| to, I can't imagine any partner would agree to it.
|
| [3] Now I do encourage to try the new tools, it is not they
| contribute to production or be an IC, it is to get a sense of
| what is possible and what is not today. A lot of pipe-dreams
| are being sold in the industry, without hands on experience
| using the new tools ( which are rapidly evolving) managers can
| tend to overestimate or misunderstand what is doable.
|
| [4]This is the core of the CTO job, writing code is rarely the
| bottleneck for productivity that was true even before
| generative coding tools, it is everything around that which
| creates friction. If you can reduce it, even writing some code
| to do so, it shouldn't be a problem or a flag.
|
| - Edited for brevity(some).
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| If you want to work on the weekend - and occasionally I find
| myself doing so as a staff level IC consultant who does need
| to spend an inordinate amount of time mentoring, project
| management, suppprting sales, interviewing candidates,
| babysitting clients, etc... - _don't_ send messages on Slack
| or email outside of business hours. I schedule messages to go
| out Monday morning and I never mention I worked on the
| weekend.
|
| I don't want to set the expectation that people should work
| outside of business hours or that I'm willing to.
| manquer wrote:
| I kill slack app on weekends , that is largely to save
| battery on the laptop working out of coffee shops, but
| serves the same purpose :)
| xnx wrote:
| The "C" stands for "Cowboy"
| sa-code wrote:
| > I don't particularly enjoy building orgs and figuring out
| people stuff. Engineering management involves navigating
| interpersonal dynamics, performance reviews, and organizational
| design. These are crucial functions, but they're not where my
| strengths lie.
|
| This bit got me. It's a direct quote from the linked post for
| those who haven't read it
| lqstuart wrote:
| Hahaha I would have led with this honestly.
|
| I'm the chief legal officer but at the end of the day I'm
| just like bruh, chill, who gives a shit
| dbbk wrote:
| Then why are you the CTO!!
|
| Dude just wants to be a staff engineer
| Lio wrote:
| Maybe. If he's a technical founder though what other
| position would you hold?
| senorrib wrote:
| Staff engineer. Founders don't necessarily need to hold
| CXO titles to work in the startups they founded.
| SJMG wrote:
| A few examples that spring to mind, Steve Wozniak and
| Mitchell Hashimoto
| doctorleff wrote:
| I recall James Goodnight of SAS coding while being a CEO.
| As per
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2014/05/12/an-
| intervi..., he still programs from time to time but
| doesn't have a specific part in development. In looking
| at the articles to refresh my memory, it is clear he is
| one of the good CEO's
| eitally wrote:
| I don't think that's the model we should be looking at
| here. I'd add Stephen Wolfram to the very short list of
| similar technical CEOs.
| obiefernandez wrote:
| Tobi Luetke at Shopify too
| tanjtanjtanj wrote:
| Wasn't Mitchell Hashimoto only a non-CxO for a handful of
| months between stepping down and selling the company?
| SJMG wrote:
| I'm not that familiar with his employment history; you
| could be right. Either way, he'd still be an example. If
| you have longer term ones, I'm sure it would add to the
| discussion
| noleary wrote:
| It's not that uncommon to keep the "CTO" title and not be
| the primary manager of the engineering organization.
| There are all kinds of things you can do with the org
| chart. If I recall correctly, Clickhouse works this way.
|
| The company's cofounders comprise three people [1]:
|
| * Aaron, a sales-oriented CEO from Elastic and Salesforce
|
| * Alexey, the original Clickhouse developer, as CTO
|
| * Yury, an experienced engineering executive from
| Google/Netflix as "President"
|
| An excerpt from the launch announcement [2]:
|
| > While negotiations were still ongoing, Katz decided
| they needed a third co-founder. "I kept thinking, if I
| could get a third co-founder to run product and
| engineering, and if I could find someone with the same
| level of experience building distributed systems on open-
| source that I have on go-to-market, it could be a really
| compelling combination," Katz says.
|
| ---
|
| ---
|
| [1] https://clickhouse.com/company/our-story
|
| [2] https://www.indexventures.com/perspectives/the-fast-
| and-the-...
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| He mentions he has nobody reporting to him. That sounds
| like he's really a staff engineer with a vanity CTO title,
| plus a lot of sway in strategic decision making.
|
| It's not a _guaranteed_ recipe for disaster, but it depends
| critically on his relationship with whoever actually
| _manages_ the engineering org. If they don't pull in the
| same direction, things go south very quickly and you end up
| with a little civil war.
|
| Either way it's a red flag and I wouldn't work there.
| Another red flag is that he wrote this blog post at all.
| Given how clearly negative the reaction to it was going to
| be, it's a strong signal he doesn't really think things
| through and has a ego wrapped up in his "coding" prowess
| and ability to circumvent process. People mention Woz as an
| example of a technical co-founder in a non-management role,
| but he is a humble guy and wouldn't brag like this.
| cantor_S_drug wrote:
| How big is assembled in terms of headcount? That should
| resolve most of the questions we are raising.
| boulos wrote:
| LinkedIn suggests "50-200". 54 work in San Francisco, and
| 154 people are associated with it. So probably closer to
| 150, but that includes a lot of Sales and Marketing
| related roles. Maybe the "engineering" org is ~100 or
| just under that.
| rgbrgb wrote:
| FWIW Carmack did this as CTO of Oculus [0]. Also pretty
| common for CTO to have like 1 direct (VP Eng) who does
| actual eng managing. You could argue it's a staff engineer
| role but I've never seen staff engineers actually get much
| say over org direction/structure or be empowered to break
| gridlock like this.
|
| [0]: https://www.uploadvr.com/john-carmacks-app-reviews-
| series/
| eitally wrote:
| This can work, imho, IFF the organization has both a CTO and
| CIO (or someone else tasked with managing the org). I've seen
| lots of places where the CTO is purely the technical
| visionary/advisor/final decision maker, and doesn't directly
| manage the technical organization.
|
| This scenario is far more common outside of the tech
| industry, where you usually have a CIO running the IT cost
| center, and a CTO making decisions about technology adoption
| strategy.
| ghaff wrote:
| CTO, CIO, and the head of engineering (the latter of which
| can often be split among different groups) are often very
| distinct things, especially at larger companies. And, yes,
| while the CTO probably has a seat at the table for
| technology direction is often primarily a public technology
| face of the company as opposed to someone involved in a lot
| of hands-on day to day technology implementation.
| LgWoodenBadger wrote:
| "Probably has a seat at the table for technology
| direction" is a wild take to me. So much so that I can't
| even formulate a response other than "what...?!"
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not sure what you find confusing. Someone can have an
| advisory and essentially technology evangelist role
| without necessarily being the ultimate decision maker.
| (And, at a larger company, a variety of folks--including
| the board--will ultimately make final consequential
| decisions.)
| acron0 wrote:
| How can the Chief Technical Officer not be the one
| chiefly responsible for technology decisions?
| ghaff wrote:
| Because, title notwithstanding, they may not be the
| person solely responsible for technical decisions
| especially at the detailed (or macro) level.
| ludwik wrote:
| There is a big leap between them not being the sole
| person responsible for technical decisions and them not
| even necessarily having a seat at the table for
| technology direction. The former is understandable. Later
| - quite surprising.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not sure what I wrote that's contrary to any of that?
| Maybe I shouldn't have used the word "probably"? There
| are a lot of people responsible for the technical
| direction of a large company of which the CTO is
| important but hardly the only one.
| YZF wrote:
| I thought it's typically Chief Technology Officer
|
| In most companies I've been a part off, including
| multiple >$1B tech companies, the CTO's focus is not on
| the engineering. That's the job of a VP Engineering or
| some similar position.
|
| CTO (which will sometimes have a "CTO office") is to work
| besides the engineering on investigating new technologies
| and ideas that are beyond what the engineering
| organization would have otherwise done on the day to day.
| They are also an authority on all technology in the
| company but are not in the engineering "chain of
| command".
|
| That said this is not universal, there are organizations
| where the CTO does lead the engineering organization. I
| think that's sub-optimal because there is always going to
| be tension between the day to day and the broader scope
| and those should be different roles.
|
| In a startup, it is more common for a CTO to lead
| engineering because there is not yet enough to justify
| having both a VP Eng and a CTO and perhaps most of the
| work is around figuring out technologies. But as the
| company grows it makes sense to separate those functions.
| ghaff wrote:
| I've seen both. A CTO office that also leads engineering
| --typically via a direct report to the CTO--and an
| organization where the CTO is largely an external
| evangelist (typically with a small staff) while
| engineering is a separate organization--though hopefully
| aligned. The view here where CTO is also the head of day-
| to-day engineering operations and technical vision is
| more of a small company/startup thing. The two are often
| separated to at least some degree at larger operations.
| richardlblair wrote:
| The technical capacity of a CTO matters less then the CTOs
| ability to stay in their lane (for a lack of a better
| term).
|
| I once worked for a company with a self taught CTO (and not
| the good kind). They had a number of star players, and this
| CTO would frequently lash out at them. All because he was
| getting in the way of them doing their jobs, doing work he
| wasn't qualified to do, trying forcing them to clean up
| after him, and then yelling at them for it. It was insanely
| toxic. I only lasted a few months. It was so bad I back
| channelled patches and project briefs to people he liked to
| get them approved.
|
| Had this CTO remained people, project and product focused
| everything would have been fine.
| whstl wrote:
| _> this CTO would frequently lash out at them [...] doing
| work he wasn 't qualified to do, trying forcing them to
| clean up after him [...] and then yelling at them for it_
|
| Was that a Fintech in Germany, by any chance? :)
|
| I once witnessed a meeting between a CTO and a Tech Lead.
| The CTO was attending from his laptop in an open office,
| and he was yelling in Russian for one hour straight at
| another Tech Lead because he wanted the tech lead to
| finish his work. It was a pathetic display, with the
| whole company watching and wondering what was going on.
|
| Eventually he was "phased out" by having a few people
| promoted to VP of engineering who would deal directly
| with the CEO instead of him.
|
| Last I heard he tried to rewrite the financial core in
| Golang by himself, but he failed since nobody wanted to
| work together with him and he doesn't really knew the
| language.
| straydusk wrote:
| You're not describing a CTO, then
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Also: "I currently manage no direct reports and ship a lot of
| code." So essentially he is just a staff engineer with a
| fancy title
| santoshalper wrote:
| Dude is a staff engineer, not a CTO.
| johnjwang wrote:
| (Author here) I stand by this comment and I think it's really
| important for engineers to recognize that everyone has
| different places where they gain and lose energy.
|
| My team and I have been extremely lucky in hiring Joe, our
| excellent head of engineering, and an extremely strong set of
| engineering managers. Not to mention incredibly strong
| product and user experience management.
|
| I think it's pretty obvious that my approach wouldn't work if
| I didn't have this bench of talented managers, but because I
| do it affords me the luxury to spend time doing things that I
| love and which are also valuable to the company.
|
| In general, I wrote this article because I think that the
| classical approach to engineering management isn't the only
| path you need to take, and a lot depends on the team you work
| with (thankfully we have a team that complements each other
| really well).
| Kudos wrote:
| You mention in the article you have no direct reports. Who
| does engineering report into in that case?
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| I'm glad you are comfortable coming forward and for sharing
| your thoughts. Not to pile on with the others here but you
| may go fast alone but you go far together when you build
| the right team. Being an individual contributor CTO is not
| being a CTO for a business that succeeds at scale. Don't
| stop doing what you love if you feel that's more important
| but it's probably best to step back from being a CTO and
| hire someone to manage that role so you can code if you
| don't want to do the job.
| 333c wrote:
| I would say that's the job of a CTO
| jaccola wrote:
| Regarding culture:
|
| Complete nonsense. The free market will tell him if he can do
| this or not. If he can get valid candidates pushing this
| culture and it's legal, why shouldn't he? You, anyone
| interviewing there or anyone working at their company
| presumably doesn't have to work there. Most countries don't
| have slavery for tech jobs!
|
| No doubt he will lose many candidates with this culture (you
| and I included) but maybe that's a strategy? Maybe he still
| gets plenty of candidates that are good and the culture he
| wants.
| mdrachuk wrote:
| > Your job at the top is, more than anything else, pushing down
| a healthy culture. The CTOs role leading the tech folk to
| support business goals, which culture a part of. The healthy
| part is a subjective thing.
| cloudhead wrote:
| That's the point -- I and others would have the opposite
| reaction, it's self selecting, so it's doing its job. I didn't
| even read the article because I thought "boring, nothing
| special about a CTO who codes, we all do."
| mritchie712 wrote:
| he's also casually trashing their engineering team... "I built
| it in a day" is suggesting no one else could have.
|
| I personally don't think there's anything wrong with doing it
| (i.e. shipping a feature quickly that a customer needs), but
| writing a blog post about it is questionable.
| switz wrote:
| No, he clearly points that anyone else would have to be taken
| off their existing work and would have to context-switch to
| the context he _already_ has. That 's not trashing his
| engineering team.
| swaits wrote:
| Don't just back away _slowly_. Run for your life!
|
| Prediction: this is the part of the AI boom that goes bust.
| Rover222 wrote:
| What's your gripe with the part about the AI productivity
| boost? For anyone working in fairly standard web dev tech, I'd
| say it's more of a red flag if a boss denies the productivity
| boost of these tools (at least when used by senior devs)
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| It seems like you're confusing technical founder CTO at a
| startup with professional CTO at a large org.
|
| For the later, what you said makes some sense, and it
| definitely seems like you're more familiar with this archetype.
|
| For the former, the article appears correct. If you've not
| worked at an early stage startup before, the culture is _very_
| different.
|
| As a side note: This article is doing it's job. People that are
| a good fit for the company will agree, and want to work with
| them. People that are not a good fit for the company will not
| agree, and naturally run the other way. Makes filtering out
| candidates easier.
| fogzen wrote:
| Working at a startup can be rewarding, but it often means
| putting in founder-level effort while the founders capture
| most of the upside.
| paholg wrote:
| At an early stage startup, shipping a feature should not
| require "many meetings across product, legal, and
| engineering". Especially not one that can be mostly built in
| a day.
| cantor_S_drug wrote:
| Snake-style org vs Elephant-style org. Nature accomodates lot
| of survival strategies. People shouldn't unnecessarily
| criticize others.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| Calling this guy a CTO is a stretch. He's a senior developer at
| a company with no CTO.
|
| If you wanted to work yourself into a CTO position, his shop
| might not be a terrible choice, although I would imagine it
| would be a bit rough at first.
| varispeed wrote:
| I fondly remember times when at one company CTO was doing round
| the dev section at 4:50pm and saying everyone close their
| machines. Go home or to pub, it's an order.
|
| Once I sent an email at 5:45pm as I forgot to say something
| earlier about the project. I didn't get a response and in the
| morning got told off that I should never send an email outside
| of working hours, unless it is a personal matter that cannot
| wait.
|
| Couple of years later the owners exited and new management
| replaced everyone with workers from consultancy of theirs.
| Company no longer exists.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| > During Thanksgiving break, I just decided to build it and
| knocked out a prototype.
|
| You don't want a boss that works on Thanksgiving and thus
| probably expects you to as well ?
|
| I'd actually be ok with this if bro offered half a million
| total comp. I'll deal with it for 5 years and then retire.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > An engineer unfamiliar with that part of the codebase would
| spend quite a lot of time figuring out those details.
|
| Your job is to delegate, yes, the first delegation is hard, but
| the engineer either grows, or doesn't (then you need to move or
| yeet).
|
| Yes I understand that you want to code all the time, then
| you're not a CTO. A CTO leads from the front, leads with
| process, and context. Your job is to provide context so that
| your team can execute.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > foregoing required legal
|
| depending on the legal requirement it may not have been
| foregoed but instead became legal because an executive did it
| sokoloff wrote:
| I took that a step farther and got written into our SOX
| compliance processes explicit "deviate from normal processes
| as much as required when this short list of people declare an
| emergency", shamelessly cribbed from aviation law.
|
| Slightly more details here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39174707
| sokoloff wrote:
| In that story, we don't know why legal would need to be
| involved. Maybe it's for a good and essential reason or maybe
| it's for a sand-in-the-gears reason.
|
| Maybe the CTO's company uses GPLv3 or AGPL software and the
| customer's legal department vomits all over AGPL and demands
| extensive review for GPLv3 for their developers. Or maybe
| they're worried about later finger-pointing and support issues.
| Or ensuring the company is running on unmodified, mainline
| sources.
|
| Those would all be reasons why the CTO's company could ship
| without involving customer legal teams without it being a red
| flag to me.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| > I built and shipped a working version in a day.
|
| If I were an engineer working under a CTO doing this, I'd find
| it extremely demotivating.
|
| Why, as a CTO, are you not setting things up so that _I_ can do
| it instead?
| johnjwang wrote:
| (Author here): I hear what you're saying, though I've never
| "crowed about regularly checking code in on Saturdays and
| Sundays" and I think that's a false characterization of my
| article.
|
| Do I love to code? For sure. Is it something I do on the
| weekends? Generally yes because it's something incredibly fun
| for me, and it gives me a lot of energy. Now, is it an
| expectation I have of my team? No, it's not because I want a
| sustainable pace for the team and I recognize not everyone has
| the same relationship with work or coding as I do.
|
| And on the "circumventing process" bit -- what I shared wasn't
| an example of blowing past legal/security review recklessly. It
| was a case where I, as someone with full context, could quickly
| build something safe and unblock a customer, going through our
| normal code review and deploy process. I don't expect anyone
| (myself included), to have any exceptions to this.
| ketamine wrote:
| I'm guessing you are ~28, maybe married and no kids.
| scrubs wrote:
| Agree. Let me say much the same through a parallel line of
| observation: maybe you dont need a this cto or any cto? Maybe
| you need to move this guy to sales.
|
| Goodness gracious corporate america. Can we PLEASE stop with
| hustle and bs?
|
| You ever heard buffet or munger say everyday they do some bill
| keeping in a double entry accounting system and AI makes them
| better? Never. Why? Because when you and your org are competent
| you're not constantly on the hussle. My guess if they need to,
| they do and as they have things on their mind they don't have
| time to blog about.
|
| People know what management at Berkshire Hathaway stands for.
| Case closed.
|
| Competent upper management can be a boon for orgs esp on cross
| functional management which builds the org and keeps ia from
| infighting and running in 10x different directions. This guy
| isn't that. Moreover that means other people on the board don't
| know that either.
| bargainbin wrote:
| Stopped reading at "CTO with no direct reports". Chief of who?
| kittikitti wrote:
| The amount of commentators that downright oppose and ridicule a
| CTO coding is why enshittification is so pervasive. If a CTO
| understands the codebase to the point where they can contribute
| to it, I presume that's a good thing. I sense so much fear of
| actual engineering and technology in the comments and it really
| highlights why startups are failing to innovate and create
| compelling products.
| re-lre-l wrote:
| Hell yeah. I was honestly pretty surprised by this reaction
| here. On one hand, I can agree with the argument about focusing
| on strategy rather than coding -- it makes sense. But on the
| other hand, I'm personally so tired of all this management
| bullshit out there, where the higher-ups have no idea about
| even the high-level technical abstractions of what's going on
| under the hood in the projects they're leading. Just imagine
| the level of incompetence when a Staff Engineer can mislead a
| Project Owner about the complexity of implementing simple
| pagination -- and the POs and PMs are totally fine with it,
| like, "let's just postpone it." Hell yeah.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Because it's not his job. He should elevate someone else into
| that IC role instead of holding it for himself. The way he
| describes it, there is no one else in the company who can do
| the IC work he is doing, which is long-term bad.
|
| Coding IC work takes a lot of focus and context that someone
| who is operating at the company-level should not really be in
| sole possession of.
|
| To me, the whole point of these positions is to take the hit on
| random bullshit, planning, people management, etc and give your
| ICs space to do the kind of work he is taking on.
|
| That doesn't mean you have no technical context or involvement
| in the development process, but it does mean you should
| probably be at least one step removed from it.
| kristianp wrote:
| I like to code as a cat. Coding as a dog is ruffer though.
| mobeigi wrote:
| I appreciated the sentiment but I do wonder how on earth a CTO
| has enough time to write one line of code, let along several
| thousands. Even before reaching the C-suite roles, higher ups
| tend to be in meetings all day, back to back. In the short amount
| of non-meeting time they find, they typically have to do other
| admin related things or information sharing.
|
| I guess that CTO uses weekends or works super long hours which I
| is fine if they don't push that expectation onto others.
|
| I'd only really expect a CTO in an early stage startup to be
| pushing code like this (and eventually stepping back when they
| grow).
| prerok wrote:
| Seems like the author has not yet learned to delegate and
| trust. I think it's an example of what not to do as a CTO.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| If you are Founder/CEO/CTO of a company it could be up to them
| to define what their workday looks like though.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| While I think CTOs should take steps back from pushing to
| production systems because there's a lot of I dotting and T
| crossing that needs to happen with production systems that CTOs
| don't reasonably have time for, if a CTO wasn't writing
| experiments and building test systems to determine technical
| direction, or at least getting their hands dirty with said
| systems produced by their top principles, I wouldn't trust
| their judgment to set direction.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| The last time I worked for a product company was 2020. I was
| the second technical hire by a then new CTO of a growing
| company started by a two non technical brothers who hired an
| outside consulting company to do all of the work.
|
| When the company found product market fit, they hired the CTO
| to bring the technology leadership in house. Early on he
| would do experimental POC work that he passed on to me to
| make it a working system as I was swamped doing my own
| architectural herding cats work as the company was growing.
|
| But as the company grew he had to deal with more of the
| business side of the things. He still set the broad outline
| of priorities. But he gave me mostly free reign of
| determining _how_ and I would just give him a brief high
| level of overview of my decisions. He did what a CTO was
| supposed to to do - grew the capabilities of his team.
|
| I've been working full time for consulting
| departments/companies since mid 2020. My goal on any project
| I'm on with more junior people is to development them. I
| purposefully give them ambiguous technical requirements with
| broad guardrails so they have the autonomy to learn and grow
| and then help them when needed and I put them in front of the
| customer early on to I present their "workstream".
|
| From a hands on keyboard side, I let them pick what they want
| to work on first and I take the left overs.
| eviks wrote:
| > I currently manage no direct reports
|
| So you're not an officer
|
| > Because it's what I love and what I'm good at. I don't
| particularly enjoy building orgs and figuring out people stuff.
|
| Was my first guess as well.
| mrasong wrote:
| I think it's great when a CTO keeps coding, that's a solid habit.
| But using that as a reason to push overtime? Definitely not a
| good idea.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| I'm a former startup CTO, and I have... err, views.
|
| In very small startups, CTOs need to code. You need as many
| people who can code checking in as possible, but you are trying
| to extend runway and so you don't have too many people on the
| team yet.
|
| Critically, at this stage of the company your attention is not
| needed elsewhere as much as it will be one day: governance is
| light, the team size is small and everyone in the business is
| talking about product market fit all the time.
|
| In more established businesses, CTOs can't code. I don't mean
| they don't have the ability, I mean they don't have time at
| first, and eventually they lose touch with the code base and
| tools to the point where getting involved slows everyone down, so
| please, on behalf of your staff, don't.
|
| These CTOs are not "stuck in meetings" - the meetings are the
| work. Meetings are work. If a meeting isn't work for you, the
| questions is why are you there. Every meeting a CTO is asked to
| attend should (and probably does), need strategic
| technical/engineering input.
|
| The CTO is going (or at least should be), because they have the
| experience, skills and ability to synthesise decisions and move
| everyone forward without having to drag all the rest of the
| senior engineering staff in. They are doing that work so that
| others don't have to.
|
| They may also sit at the top of the org chart for a section of
| the company that means HR, Finance or other senior stakeholders
| want to engage them in order to drive strategic changes.
|
| For a long time, I joked I was in the middle: I worked for
| startups that were small enough I had to code, but I didn't have
| the time because of everything else. So I coded, but I was
| exhausted.
|
| And now you know why it's "former" CTO. This stage is painful.
| The temptation is to do both. Perhaps start working long days or
| weekends, but that sends a poor signal to your team.
|
| Complaining or boasting about being very busy or working long
| days is not the badge of honour you might think it is: it's a
| signal to your team that you can't manage your time, and you
| don't value work/life balance. They will vote with their feet if
| that carries on for more than a month or two.
|
| The better solution is, in my view, find the work/life balance,
| prioritise and say no to things that don't fit. It's often easier
| to say no to coding tasks, which you can hire other people to do,
| than it is to say no to the CEO about something they need doing,
| which you can't hire other people to do (at least, not without
| replacing you). Make clear - and signal to others - that you're
| going to choose how you spend your time carefully, but not
| because you are a precious resource but because that's the
| culture you want to instil and for them to do the same. Lead by
| example, always.
|
| As an aside, even in small startups, when you are coding as a
| CTO, you should not choose the things that excite you the most,
| but the things that get in the way of your team the most.
|
| Your engineering staff don't want you to take the meaty things
| that customers value - they want to do that, it's why they took a
| crap salary and the promise of untold options-based riches,
| because at least they get to work on meaningful things customers
| get excited by.
|
| What they'll value is that horrid piece of refactoring that
| nobody wants to go near just going away, or that nasty new
| feature that needs integrating with that third party API everyone
| hates working with.
|
| Your job as CTO is not to be "the best guy in engineering", it's
| to move all the obstacles out of the way of the engineering team
| to make them all the best they can possibly be.
|
| Get rid of their reasons/excuses for failure, by doing whatever
| it is that needs to be done to help them succeed.
|
| Sometimes, that means focusing on being in meetings to make sure
| that new policies or product directions aren't going to chop
| their feet out from underneath them. That means you need to
| realise that meetings are the work. Get over it.
|
| And if you don't want to do that, and instead throw PRs over the
| wall that you & AI put together on a Saturday morning and expect
| a round of applause and hearty thanks... again, expect people to
| vote with their feet eventually.
| guilhermesfc wrote:
| I wish I worked for you!
| vader_n wrote:
| I hate fluff pieces, self promoting garbage.
| xedarius wrote:
| Pricing section of your website has no prices, I'd suggest
| calling that section something else.
| sharts wrote:
| This may as well be titled "Why I code...as an ex-Google
| Millionaire."
|
| Because that's how ridiculous this person is.
| xrd wrote:
| I stopped reading when he said "I have no direct reports" in the
| first paragraph. If you are the CTO and have no direct reports,
| you are pretending to be a CTO because that is not what a CTO
| does.
|
| (Actually, I did read more, but with contempt stuck in my
| eyes...)
|
| AI coding tools are great, and the biggest problem they create is
| that inexperienced people think they can now make technical
| contributions AND management. Totally untrue. Coding is a tiny
| part of the technical contribution, and AI tools right now mostly
| do ONLY that. Troubleshooting and debugging, and communication,
| and gathering customer requirements are much harder to delegate
| to AI tools. And, maintenance of code is the real cost center,
| and AI tools have yet to be proven on that front, and my
| experiences so far make me think this will be marginal
| improvements, not 10x improvements.
|
| I'm going to paraphrase his comment about "shipping a vital
| customer feature by myself because I'm a big boy coder" (maybe I
| added something there, not sure) because I don't want to deal
| with the pain of reading it again. I see this all the time where
| CTOs brag about vibe coding something, and it is always to prove
| to the team how fast they can go as if that's the main problem.
| Focusing on that work means you are not writing down coding
| standards, managing team dynamics, and dealing with the hard
| problems. Those problems don't go away on their own, they are the
| real problems, and the downstream effects are what experienced
| CTOs and technical managers know all too well.
| fooster wrote:
| There are lots of different types of CTO. Who are you to say
| which is right and which is wrong?
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Who said a janitor can't call himself a CTO?
| zkmon wrote:
| There are a few serious issues with this kind of "passion" in a
| work area outside of yours.
|
| * PR reviews for your commits may not be honest, as people may
| hesitate to reject your code changes.
|
| * You may not have time for your actual responsibilities.
|
| * It may confuse people about your role.
|
| * May be you are not letting some folks do their job.
|
| * You are probably a coder at heart, not a CTO.
| jenadine wrote:
| > PR reviews for your commits may not be honest [...]
|
| True. That's already something I struggle being the most senior
| in my team. It is hard to find reviewer for my commits who dare
| to actually reject my code.
| tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote:
| That sounds a bit odd. I am the most senior in my team and
| when I make mistakes, my peers reject it.
|
| If people on the team don't dare to reject code from other
| members on the team, then it sounds like your team has some
| serious issues.
| zkmon wrote:
| In a practical, work-world of humans, the org hierarchies
| do matter and impact the way these humans interact with
| each other. Maybe not for bots.
| lonelyprograMer wrote:
| Summary: CTO of a small company codes. I don't see any issues,
| and it's not surprising.
| Cyclone_ wrote:
| I've heard of plenty of CTOs coding at small startups, but the
| surprising part is he has no direct reports.
| andsoitis wrote:
| A CTO who codes and who has no reports?
|
| Every hour they spend coding is time not spent doing the things
| only the CTO can do.
|
| They really need to hire a programmer or two and focus on their
| job.
| throw-10-13 wrote:
| This reads like an engineer that got promoted to his level of
| incompetence.
| gdsdfe wrote:
| Well the only thing this post proves is that it's not because
| people call you CTO that you actually are one. While I do think
| CTOs should keep a pulse on code quality, process and dev
| experience, I don't think this is the way to do it.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| People are dunking on this guy, but as a founder I can say that
| if you're a CTO at an early to early-mid stage company, you
| better be getting your hands dirty with your tech base, both the
| hardware and software.
| majgr wrote:
| Please, do not. Nobody will do a real code review for such a
| person. Nobody will start a discussion if this or that change
| makes sense. If you have managerial position stick to it and do
| not make other people's lives miserable
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Depends a lot on the culture. I used to work for a small team
| of about 10-15 engineers and the CTO was a good person. He
| would write code about as much as the rest of us. He was just
| the leader, engi 0. So we treated his code reviews similarly.
| It was actually nice giving him review because asking questions
| would be met with more business context and would be a good way
| to learn about the development process.
|
| Any good engineer will be grateful you find issues in their
| work, especially if you help track down solutions.
|
| Of course, the CTO depending on AI to solve things may be less
| like that, IDK. Or even before AI I knew the type. I once gave
| a new CTO a whitepaper to read in private to understand some of
| the direction I was taking a project, and he basically flipped
| out. So YMMV.
| jt2190 wrote:
| Most comments here are assuming that there's only "one, true CTO"
| role when in fact the role is essentially "everything that's left
| over after you've delegated to others".
|
| > When I was figuring out my role as CTO, I read Greg Brockman's
| blog post about defining the CTO role at Stripe. He talked to a
| bunch of other CTOs and realized there's enormous variance in
| what the role looks like. Some CTOs are technical visionaries,
| some are org builders, some are infrastructure-focused. The
| commonality is that great CTOs figure out where they can create
| the most value given their particular skills, interests, and
| company context.
|
| > For me, that's meant writing a lot of code. It works because of
| my particular context: I enjoy building software more than org
| design, I have deep customer and codebase knowledge that makes me
| particularly effective, and we've hired strong engineering
| managers.
| funnyfoobar wrote:
| I don't want to come across as judgemental or anything, nor I did
| deep research on your background.
|
| It appears like you became a CTO, because you co-founded the
| company, not because you rose to the rank.
|
| If you were to join a different company with this approach you
| are taking, I doubt if you would even reach Staff level.
| habosa wrote:
| I'm not totally against CTOs who code (I like having management
| that I respect technically) but it sounds like this CTO is pretty
| clearly doing too much coding and not enough CTO-ing.
|
| Posts like these show why the founding engineer is the most
| underpaid person in Silicon Valley. This CTO probably has 30% of
| the company. There's probably a founding engineer doing 90% of
| the same work for years (and likely doing the technical bits
| better) for 1-1.5% of the company max.
| alexnewman wrote:
| I manage too many to code. I can hardly qa it all. Instead i have
| been vibe coding on my own for fun. I usually do it before anyone
| else wakes up. I like to think it helps me stay fresh
| drunken_thor wrote:
| This is just a pride post with little self awareness.
| dccoolgai wrote:
| Lots of naysaying this, and I don't necessarily disagree with the
| general skepticism, but there's something I learned in Military
| Science class in college that I found interesting: in the U.S.
| marines, every marine from generals to janitors is rated and
| trained as a capable combat marksman with a rifle regardless of
| their specialization.
| morsecodist wrote:
| This is such an interesting comment thread because people have
| such wildly different opinions and from my perspective the entire
| disagreement just comes from company size.
|
| I am a "CTO" and I always put that in air quotes because I have
| one direct report and I spend the lion's share of my time doing
| IC work. I know what I do is not what people picture when they
| hear the title and I feel weird saying it. I use it because I do
| have to make the strategic technical decisions, there is no one
| else. When people are marketing technical B2B SaaS I am the one
| they are looking for.
|
| From my perspective there just isn't nearly enough for me to do
| as a CTO to justify me not coding. If I were to hire someone just
| to manage them that would be an unjustifiable expense at this
| point. But I also get that as soon as we get to a reasonable size
| this would be totally unsustainable.
| 51Cards wrote:
| This sounds like myself as well. We are a small dev team of 6
| (in a company of 30), however I also have a partial ownership
| stake in the company. Even though I spend a significant part of
| my time on "CTO" style work (client meetings, market
| assessments, product overviews, roadmap planning, third party
| collaboration, etc.) there also isn't near enough of that to
| fill my time or justify my salary. I code and review like my
| team does, but I also oversee technical direction for our whole
| portfolio and the responsibility for that technical success or
| failure rests on me. As we grow the coding will decrease I'm
| sure, but I see a lot of people here criticizing from a
| perspective of larger companies where a CTO would be a full
| time thing. In our situation the title (as much as I often
| dislike it) represents my level of responsibility, if not
| directly the full scope of my role.
| solodev222 wrote:
| I respectfully agree with many of the comments here, but I can
| also recognize the value and effort of someone sharing their
| experience. It shows character, boldness and opens up dialogue.
| People are central to any effort in accomplishing a certain goal,
| even if it is a single individual. Organization is meant to
| facilitate the joint effort in accomplishing the common goals in
| a structured and systematic way. Having had the experience of
| taking technical leadership without the title or stake on the
| company, I still value people who actually care. And that is
| precisely what I can extract from reading this post. Keep the
| genuine love for the craft going, don't let yourself down by
| people who don't get it.
| alwahi wrote:
| wait i thought amd changed their logo and wondering why their cto
| is coding.
| lazyant wrote:
| The new SEO fad is CEOs and CTOs writing articles trying to look
| like a regular guy.
|
| Also the "C" in CTO means Chief, as in main manager (of
| managers); if you have no direct report you are not a manager,
| let alone a "chief" one; call yourself Founder/Distinguished
| Engineer
| rstephenson2 wrote:
| It was hard to tell if he means he doesn't do meetings at all,
| though it's kind of implied. There are lots of high leverage
| activities around advocating for engineering's perspectives among
| the other executives and bringing the business context to
| engineering, both of which don't involve directly managing
| reports.
|
| But I'm also surprised to see so many comments advocating for the
| CTO disconnecting from the code in favor of doing more people
| management. As soon as they stop writing code their skills start
| decaying, their advice and technical direction is reduced to
| platitudes and thought leadership. It may seem like a CTO who
| doesn't code will stop making technical decisions and just
| delegate, but I'd posit that they make decisions regardless, just
| worse ones.
|
| It seems like this sentiment relates closely to the ideas around
| dual track career progression, and having technical leadership
| tied to hiring and managing people. Hiring engineering talent is
| certainly important to the company, but is quite orthogonal to
| technical decision making and it seems like a natural place to
| split the role.
| LouisSayers wrote:
| He's probably right that no-one else can do what he can, because
| competent Devs aren't going to work for a company that operates
| like this.
|
| If you have to build something because "Devs are too busy working
| on other things", then you're just bad at prioritising tasks.
|
| If your team "can't do what I can" then you're bad at hiring.
|
| I don't mind if a CTO works on a bug ticket, but make it _part of
| the usual process_ , not hero driven development. Otherwise,
| what's even the point of having a process in the first place?!
| PerilousD wrote:
| Sorry - you lost me at manage with NO direct reports. You, maybe,
| manage the coffee orders for the board of directors? I don't know
| if they exist anymore, but IBM, Microsoft, HP used to call you
| folks "Fellows" not CTO's and a nice position if you can get it
| but get over yourself.
| zbentley wrote:
| Man, we have got to bring the "chief engineer" title back into
| more companies.
|
| CTO-titled people who self admittedly aren't interested in
| leading groups of people set a terrible example for smaller
| outfits, and a confusing and tempting example for eng leadership
| at larger ones.
| wavemode wrote:
| > Between org structure, roadmap incentives, and limited risk
| budget, few engineers can take months to pursue ambiguous bets.
|
| > I can.
|
| It's weird to hear a company executive say essentially "this work
| is important, but our company has too much bureaucracy and risk
| aversion for a regular IC to spend time working on this, so I
| just do it myself." Like, maybe that means you should actually be
| spending your time removing those roadblocks, instead?
|
| It's no wonder why small companies innovate more than large
| companies. What is a wonder is, why many small companies
| intentionally make themselves more like large companies and lose
| their innovative spark as a result.
| mocmoc wrote:
| A yet this people still exist.
|
| I will say it over and over. Do not code as a CTO.
| hacb wrote:
| I don't want my CTO to code, I want my CTO to have a clear vision
| and listen to engineers
| holoduke wrote:
| Been there done that. As a cto you don't spend time with details.
| Impossible to go deep and wide at the same time. Super humans
| don't exist. Fine to coach or teach people by coding. But
| shipping weekend products and bypassing team processes isn't
| really motivating. Apply for a dev job instead.
| blinkymach12 wrote:
| The struggle I found in coding as a CTO was that executive team
| priorities would come along that would take precedence over my
| ability to maintain my coding contributions, and in my experience
| no developer team wants to inherit and maintain code from their
| CTO. I found myself ultimately more drawn to coding tasks that
| improved developer experience or validated proof-of-concept work.
|
| I agree with the author that CTO positions are incredibly varied,
| so I appreciate them sharing what works for them personally and
| in their organization, even if it doesn't match what has worked
| for me.
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