Ask HN: I don't enjoy being a CTO. Now what?

A CTO's role should be technical leadership. If a major part of your role is dealing with everyone's crap and putting out fires, I wouldn't necessarily consider that technical leadership.

I've been in a similar situation, and for me, the right solution was having the right people under me that I could trust to fight the fires.

You should be deciding how the fires are fought, but your team should fight them. At least some part of your day should be available for steering your team/organization/product.

(But code, not so much. :)

The challenge of leadership is that of leading people, not of writing code. Dealing with people can be messy, frustrating, and depressing, but it's what needs to be done.

As a CTO, I code about 30% of the time, but I expect that to go down as our company grows. Much of the time I deal with people who were offended that so-and-so shot down their new design, or they think their career is being harmed because they can't rewrite the entire product in Clojure, or senior management is freaking out because of one minor bug that hits an important customer.

If you can see a path to where you want your company and team to be in a few years, then stay and try to move down that path. It is very rewarding to see tangible progress in your product and your team. If you want to be coding all day, find another job.

I feel ya! So my experience is not exactly the same, but I really get where you're coming from... About a decade ago was the last time that I touched any code as part of my dayjob. I was a web developer for 6 years, and I've been either a project manager or product manager for almost 10 years...and funny enough, for the latter couple of years as a dev. I yearned to move to a position where I sat between the "tech" teams and the "business" teams. I thought this was a natural progression up. I was told that I had a knack for explaining complex and technical things in easy-to-digest way for non-techies. So I tried the non-dev route. Fast-forward some time, and I've changed companies a couple of times since then, and without looking almost a decade has passed. My current and last job has led me to the most disappointing moments of my professional career. I won't say depression but feels pretty close to it. In my case i think it feels like nowadays I'm not building anything. The feeling that I used to get as a developer was that I was building something. I totally get that building something means different things between someone who sits at a desk and churns out code vs. people who build essential things such as wells and irrigation systems for some struggling third world country...nevertheless, at the end of my days as a "coder" i still felt like I introduced something into this world; I had such a sense of accomplishment, even if my salary didn't express that. In the last decade, I'm lucky enough to have had something to take my mind off things: in essence, my family. If it wasn't for my wife and daughter to fill my days with joy (and yes the usual family ups-and-downs, but hey, its still a distraction!)...if it wasn't for my family, surely I would have slipped into a deep depression. What makes things tough - now - is that after almost a decade of not touching code, its that much harder to "go back into codding", at least as a dayjob. Ok, I'm stopping now because this is mere blathering (and i should just post on my own).

...Suffice it to state: YOU ARE NOT ALONE with the remorse you feel with direction of your professional career! The only tiny bit of advice I can provide to you: find a healthy mix of non-work-related distractions in your life AND jump around to different companies. The fact that you have such great experience is something some relevant company will find useful; you simply need to tell them your goals, and hope things align.

Good luck!

I'm surprised that no-one has suggested getting a VP Eng alongside you.

http://avc.com/2011/10/vp-engineering-vs-cto/

Honestly, it's not far off from a typical CTO role. Being CTO is about connecting the technology side of the company with the vision and business goals of the company, and making sure the two match. There are great ways to structure the technology and build out the product that don't contribute to the business goals or even the vision of the startup (and can even be opposed to it), and there are sometimes less-than-ideal ways of building the technology of a company that get it where it needs to be when it needs to be there.

The CTO's job is about half technology and half business when it's a small startup. As the startup grows, you can't possibly make every technology decision, and so your job is more about getting the right people in place who can make the best technology decisions on your behalf as long as you keep them appraised of what the business needs are driving each of their decisions. And because getting those people in place and managing those people is almost all on the business side, your role becomes more about active business management while maintaining an in-depth awareness of the technology so that you can step in and correct course as necessary.

These are all just generalizations of course, as every startup is different. I imagine if you're the CTO of a startup that caters to software developers and code, you probably get to continue devoting some portion of your time to coding. Even in other startups, I've seen a lot of CTO's (myself included) get to actually do some code occasionally, but it's more like once every 1 to 3 months, which sounds about in line with what you're doing.

I think the CTO role you desire does exist, but it's in a specific, somewhat narrow stage for a startup. It sounds like you desire to be a co-founding CTO of a very early-stage (possibly idea-stage) startup. I think your desired traits for the responsibilities of a CTO can also continue to exist years into a startup's operations if the startup remains bootstrapped and self-funded.

From my experience (both with bootstrapped and venture funded startups), when a startup takes venture funding and forms a board, the CTO role becomes more about managing expectations, facilitating understanding of the technology to the depth needed to those who need to understand it to make the proper business decisions, and more importantly, contributing to and making the business decisions that require the knowledge of the technology that only you bring to the leadership and management team. The smae change in responsibilities happens to bootstrapped startups that become big enough, but the change is more organic and occurs over a longer period of time (which actually makes sense when you consider that venture funding is intended to make non-organic growth occur over a faster timeframe).

More cynically, I guess this management of expectations and facilitation of communication could be described as "dealing with everyone's crap," but really, it's probably what the startup needs. If you truly think it's not what the startup needs, then speak up! You are the CTO after all, and that's now part of your job to make sure the company is making progress. But recognize that the business side of a startup is as important (often more important depending on what the startup does, how it's funded, what it's milestones are, etc.) as the technology side, so make sure you understand the importance and motivations of what everyone else is trying to accomplish in the company before dismissing their actions wholesale.