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

I am dealing with the same problem, though I am not sure what makes me happy exactly. I think sometimes we get into this carrier path thing and just move forward through inertia. Things are good on paper, but in reality you feel like crap.

I don't know, I am slowly trying to move away from my current job. I am planning to use savings to buy websites, the idea kind of excites me, which is a great feeling to have.

They wouldn't, of course. And that's really the problem.

If you don't have mid-level technical managers with MBAs, you don't get to promote/hire VP-level technical MBAs.

An MBA does teach a lot of valuable skills. As many smart technical founders/leaders have crashed up against the corporate rocks of running a major division/initiative as business leaders failed due to distance from execution.

Right now though there's no role, and no opportunity, for a mid-tier (post-MBA) capital-E engineer. So there will be no MBA-toting, engineering-aware VPs.

Without business-fluent engineers (or engineering-fluent business folks) companies are deprived of interdisciplinary innovation. You get financial programs which ignore technical needs, and great inventions which don't have a market. Promotion which doesn't represent reality and deals which can't be executed.

Most of the frustration engineers have with business people is not that business folks can't do business well, but that they don't do so understanding the underlying technology.

And until there's a reason to want a techie MBA (or business-y Eng) at a sub-VP level, this isn't going to get better.

This is false, and also misses the point.

I went through two recruiting cycles at HBS (Harvard Business School), which is one of the largest (~1000/yr) and most representative business schools. I did not see a single position advertised which required actual engineering experience. I was also one of three people (in 1000) who had a job before school which required writing code.

There were plenty of companies which would have loved to hire a solid engineer, but the job they'd be hired into would neither require nor use those skills. I could certainly go work in Product Management at Google, for instance; but why would I want to? My better path to VP at Google would be as a coder (if I wanted to be a VP at Google).

> There are few CTOs because a 50K employee company only has 1 CTO. Others are CEO, COO, CIO.

There is 1 CTO in the HBS alumni database. There are more than 36,000 CEOs. CEO-CTO is probably ~2:1 in the real world.

ps: data mining the HBS Alumni database is fascinating, btw!

Not sure how old you are but a CTO role might make more sense later in life.