31–40 of 228 posts
I took up a job as CTO after being a lead developer and junior partner at a bunch of startups. OMG what a punishment. I've now resolved to just go out on my own because it's too painful working for anyone else in this curious position of great responsibility but not enough power.
Quit. Just leave. Go back to coding. It's obvious you don't enjoy management, there's no shame in admitting that. Rather than inflict your misery on the rest of the team, get back to your wheelhouse where you can be happy, your team can be happy, and ultimately your company (current or future) can be happy.
I have worked in a job where the CTO (my boss) was in your exact position (in fact, if it weren't for your style of writing - English was very obviously his third or fourth language - I would almost bet money that you were him, your stories are that eerily similar) and it was a miserable experience. $CTO was an otherwise brilliant coder who was on his first cto-gig outside of 'team leader'. Outside of work, he was a great guy - warm, personable, funny. At work, he resented not being able to code in many different ways, often with the team bearing the brunt of his misery. He'd often make decisions for others to implement, then second (or third) guess himself days or weeks later, insist we throw out all the work, and start again. He'd often be irritable, make rash decisions, have temper flare-ups, ask for feedback then get upset when he got it, etc. It was a bad scene for all involved, but the dude was a walking personification of the Peter Principle. He would have been infinitely happier remaining a coder, and his team (myself included) would have been infinitely happier with a CTO comfortable in a leadership position.
CTO is all about leadership. If this doesn't work for you then I suggest your "what next?" is a return to Lead Architect or Lead Developer roles at another company.
Start cold-emailing CTOs in the same portfolio as your company. They'll be happy to help.
The story is about KILLING ANTS.
(Note: I lived in mostly peaceful coexistence with "my" ants - they had their roads through my living room and I ignored them, unless they started to crawl around my food. So no need to get upset, no excessive ant-killing took place in the development of this example.)
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You kill a few ants in your kitchen. You can do that with your thumb or any object. However you do, it is a physical interaction between you and the ant(s). To kill more you repeat the same physical action. Killing one ant: one thumb press. Killing one hundred: one hundred thumb presses.
So the critical skill and the concrete action you will be doing throughout your ant-killing career is the "thumb press". Or if you use poison your skill is thumb pressing the spray can to distribute the poison.
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Let's jump a few layers.
You become so good you attract the attention of the California governor. He puts you in charge of ant-killing in California.
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QUESTION:
Will you do the same thing you did before, only more of it? A billion "thumb presses" instead of a few hundred?
Of course not!
You will never see or even touch a single ant yourself in your new job.
Instead of with ants you now work with a) humans, b) lawyers, c) regulations, d) logistics, e) statistics(!!!). You need to hire thumb-pressers, you need to organize poison - tons of it. You need to distribute the poison. You have to create maps and tell the middle managers where they should send their troops. You need to deal with absentees, internal politics, laws regulating work hours and poisons, people who were poisoned by your ant-killing troops because they misused the poisons. You need to collect numbers: Where were ants seen in the state? How many before the killing, how many after a week, a month, a year? Were the measures effective?
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Compare the skills you need to control - kill - ants in your apartment or house with the skills you need to kill ants in ALL houses all over the state or country.
It SOUNDS like it is the same task - "kill ants". But human language is deceptive - 100% context dependent. "Scale" changes a problem completely.
If your ant-killing employees see any benefit at all in seeing you too kill an ant occasionally it is purely subjective "he's one of us", objectively each hour you yourself spend killing ants means you don't do your actual job of managing. It helps when you have past(!) experience - but joining your workers now really means that a) your are not doing your job or b) the problem still is low-scale (small startup - or, in the case of ants, even though you are responsible for ant-killing in the state there only are a handful of houses where there is anything to do).
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Or another example, moving soil: If you need to move a tiny bit of earth you can use your hands. If it's a little bit you use a shovel - already you will no longer touch the soil directly. If you need to move even more soil you use an excavator - you now are even farther from the actual soil, and you need to know a lot about the machine, organize diesel fuel, spare parts, etc. If you need to move a vast amount of soil you get to the same problem as above, you don't even see the soil any more, you direct an organization, people, logistics, statistics, etc.
I was a very hands-on CTO for years after a decade of coding, and broadly enjoyed it. But as the teams I managed grew it became increasingly unfulfilling. When you're CTO, you're often excluded from business decisions which have a bigger impact on your team than any tech innovation, and the input you do have can be hard to relate to the shared business context of the CEO/COO/CFO.
So I went and got an MBA (Harvard).
Now I know exactly how to frame (and improve!) my non-technical contributions, have much more context on what "success" means, and have the credibility to really be a part of the senior team.
Unfortunately, there's no real place in the world for a highly technical business leader. You have to leave code behind at a certain point and spend your time on people/financial/planning issues. The ultimate end of that road is CEO, and not everyone wants to go there.
Also, I'd really misdiagnosed my malaise. What I'd been missing was not strategic input, but the opportunity to build things. To weave together inspiration and ideas into innovation and growth. I love building things and challenging assumptions, it fulfills me.
Now I'm off to start a new venture as a solo entrepreneur. The only truly successful technical leader is the founder, and that feels right. My last day at my day job is June 30th. :)
If you love coding and solving problems, you may find yourself less fulfilled farther down that line.
We're also talking about titles that end up being somewhat arbitrary and non-transferrable once we take companies of different sizes into account. CTO of a 10 person startup might translate to Tech Lead in an enterprise software business. CTO at a startup might still get to write code (I know many that do), whereas CTO at a company with a couple hundred developers might not even see code.
If you aren't happy, find somewhere that you can do what you enjoy doing. If this is truly your first senior management position, it might be clear that senior management isn't for you - or this isn't the organization that you should be in a senior management position. You could certainly find Sr Mgt or CTO roles where coding is part of the everyday routine.