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
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.
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.
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
> 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.
This is an interesting question - I am a CTO at >1B tech company and there is no doubt that part of my role is exactly this - Technology Strategy.
How do I do it?
(1) It is my job to be familiar with a wide range of technologies, which might include tech stacks, but us mostly tech offerings. The tech offerings means lots of meetings with companies that build tech that we might use. Some of those are useful, most are painful.
(2) Actually using technology - IMHO - This is one of the most important aspects of the CTO job. I code all the time, but not for any of our products or operations. I code to learn so I can help make better decisions. We use Kafka for instance, and when we first started using it I built a cluster in my homelab so I had a better idea how it worked. The same with Hadoop, Cassendra, and a few different flavors of Kubernetes. The T in CTO is for 'technology', but it really should be for 'technical'.
(3) Perhaps the single most important thing - I try to hire people that are much smarter than I am, always. The amount I learn from people that are smarter/faster/better is many orders or magnitude greater and more valuable than the reverse.
(4) All the rest of the CTO job needs to support this - so budgeting, head count plans, spending strategy, patents and IP, roadmaps, decisions, etc. All of these details have to roll up and hopefully support a strategy.
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.
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.
> 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.
Exactly. The best reading is that they wasted their own time on it. The worst case is that a simple clearly valuable thing is something the company is incapable of doing. Both are dysfunctional.
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.
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.
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.
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