
What Makes a CTO - askoxyz
https://pressbro.com/what-makes-a-cto/
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teilo
I entirely disagree with your premise that a CTO should know as much about
coding as a top developer.

No, a good CTO should have a broad understanding of technology and the
development process; understand finance sufficiently to manage the budget of
his department; have good communication skills so as to translate the needs of
the business to the people who will be implementing the technology to support
those needs; and be a good project manager so he is able to properly delegate
tasks to those best suited to completing them, and keep his resources
accountable.

He should certainly understand code, and perhaps even write code himself. But
be able to replace any given person he manages? No. He does not need to be an
effective coder. He needs to be an effective manager, and ideally a servant
leader.

I speak from experience, as a CTO.

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endymi0n
Dude, chill.

First off, to get hired as a CTO, you don't need to convince developers,
you'll have to convince founders and investors. That's a whole different game,
perfectly played by a few people I know who have equivalent (lack of) tech
skills to the guy you're describing.

CTO roles can also be filled pretty differently. The most upper one I've ever
dealt with (group CTO of a huge media corporation) visited us and was totally
fascinated by this Scrum thing we did (which we had to explain to her). Pretty
sure she couldn't code a single line. You don't have to, when your main
business is overall strategy, representing and managing other CTOs, often
times they'll hire MBA's rather than tech people for these upper echelon
positions.

Then again, you're probably referring to a startup / small company CTO. While
you should certainly have some deeper tech chops in order to be taken
seriously by the people you hire, I can assure you it's almost impossible to
stay at the level of coding proficiency of the people you hire when you're
caring for architecture, strategy, clients, management and investor relations
(due diligence etc.) at the same time.

Source: I'm CTO myself and I only hire people who are better coders than I am.

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askoxyz
Good points. I guess it's a lot more like politics and a lot less like trying
to win a developer of the month position and I agree that my understanding of
a CTO is biased. Yes, the company he works for is small and he only manages
people I can count on my one hand.

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ChuckMcM
Wow, that is pretty painful. Short answer is getting hired as a CTO doesn't
make you one, and there are people who fill the role but don't have the title,
but perhaps most importantly the role isn't as well defined as some people
think.

Sometimes people exploit that. Some companies are so desperate to hire they
will give someone pretty much any title they want (as opposed to money) so you
see people without a significant track record in some sort of executive title
role. But in all cases it is what folks do with it, not the title. In
pathological cases it gets weird. I met a person whose first job out of
college was VP of Engineering for a 4 person company which he used to convince
a 10 person company to hire him as their VP Eng, which he used a 20 person
company to hire him as their VP Eng, up the line until he was hired by a 1500
person company as their VP Eng where he was fired shortly after being hired.
He really didn't have any clue as to what was needed in that role.

That said, in "real" CTO roles there are several but they usually require
someone who can both debate things in a business context and a technical
context, or in sales oriented companie explain to the technical people of a
client enough about the product so they will be comfortable buying it. In non-
technical companies the CTO is often really just a glorified IT guy with a
smattering of social network support to help marketing with their branding
efforts. In very large enterprise companies there might he half a dozen CTO
"titles" of which only 1 is actually an officer of the company as defined by
the SEC.

But none of that really matters for this author's rant. I can't figure out if
they are amazed, jealous, or disgusted at the prospect of this person for
which they clearly have no respect whatsoever holding a job with a title which
they clearly covet.

~~~
aries1980
> Some companies are so desperate to hire they will give someone pretty much
> any title they want

Indeed. It looks strange when companies have C-level executives without being
the "chief" of other layer of executives. Also can be a bad message to new
hires: even if you become a better leader, better manager, we already have a
"chief", so tough luck.

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nasalgoat
I'd say it's more important for a CTO to have soft skills than be a top-notch
programmer. The job is about seeing the forest for the trees and properly
directing people based on experience and basic knowledge.

The idea that a CTO is some sort of "super dev" who is the best coder in the
company _and_ a great people manager is like the 10x engineer myth. They might
exist but they are pretty rare.

As CTO, I know enough programming to know bad practices and give general
guidance to avoid major pitfalls (like, perhaps, exception handling and
avoiding compiler warnings), but my job is to make sure people deliver a
product that meets the overall company goals, and to manage people.

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mwpmaybe
I'm reminded of this[0] excellent post by VC Mark Suster.

0\. [http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/want-to-know-
difference-b...](http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/want-to-know-difference-
between-a-cto-and-a-vp-of-engineering/)

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ifoundthetao
I hope I don't have friends like OP in my life.

