
Ask HN: How can we teach our CTO to understand his new role? - trashymctrash
Hey everyone, I&#x27;ve been working with a guy who has been a solo developer for most of his life and owned his own company. After a merger, he is now the CTO of a company with an existing developer team.<p>The struggle we are facing now:<p>- He is not responsive at all, neither via chat, nor email, nor any other communication tool. So we often have to write him via chat &quot;Please look at this PR, I left some comments&quot; etc...<p>- He doesn&#x27;t know how to delegate and often says &quot;I&#x27;ll do it&quot; but then it takes weeks to finish<p>- He has thousands of unread emails in his inbox<p>- When he writes tickets, the details are often unclear and hard to follow for other developers<p>- He codes way too much for a CTO, in my opinion, and his code is a bit messy compared to the other developers<p>Since he is a really nice person, we all want to give him feedback that makes him understand his role better, and to become more efficient and avoid being a bottleneck.<p>Has anyone struggled with this in the past, and found a solution, or at least a way to see small, but steady improvements? I know that changing another person is one of the hardest things one can attempt to do, but at the same time I know that he is motivated to become a good CTO, but currently just doesn&#x27;t know how yet.
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bdavis__
More important, what does his boss think about his job performance. You seem
to be complaining that your CTO is not a developer. Which, in general, he
should not be.

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trashymctrash
I think he knows that he is not performing well. But he also says he does not
want to give up coding, because then he would "lose something"

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djiwandou_asp
in my opinion, there's so much thing to do when you are a CTO, especially when
your team are not yet mature enough. it is possibly the case for your team,
however, please help him (or get someone to help him) by assigning task in
order to make him realize that this is actually his job -more important than
coding-

