A CTO should be technical
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A CTO should be technical
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Re: A CTO should be technical
#2There's a point when "technical enough" comes back into the picture. A gigantic company with 50k employees the CTO is barely relevant to any real tech decisions. They are tangentially related but not "in-the-weeds" technical
Contrast that to a tech startup, or any startup I suppose. Those CTO's absolutely need to be "in-the-weeds" capable.
Re: A CTO should be technical
#3I'd say it's important for a CTO to be a CTO. I've been at too many places where the CTO only wanted to be a software developer/architect and would not focus on process, cost, employees, etc. CTO is a leadership role, and leadership means you have to take care of all the responsibilities under your authority, not just the interesting ones.
IMHO, too many people chase the CTO title but few really want the actual job.
Re: A CTO should be technical
#4The question is: what tech?
I worked at software companies, where the CTO was equivalent to the CIO, and I worked at classical engineering companies where they had both, because their tech had nothing to to with IT.
Re: A CTO should be technical
#5I'd say it's important for a CTO to be a CTO. I've been at too many places where the CTO only wanted to be a software developer/architect and would not focus on process, cost, employees, etc. CTO is a leadership role, and leadership means you have to take care of all the responsibilities under your authority, not just the interesting ones. IMHO, too many people chase the CTO title but few really want the actual job.
I personally believe it's easier for a technical person to become reasonably competent at process, cost and other management stuff vs a management person to become reasonably competent at technical things. When I was contractor I saw terrible decisions made by CTO and CIO in several companies because they didn't have any technical taste and ran everything by numbers and processes. I definitely believe a CTO should be very strong technically and have a good bullshit detector.
Re: A CTO should be technical
#6There's a point when "technical enough" comes back into the picture. A gigantic company with 50k employees the CTO is barely relevant to any real tech decisions. They are tangentially related but not "in-the-weeds" technical Contrast that to a tech startup, or any startup I suppose. Those CTO's absolutely need to be "in-the-weeds" capable.
I think it still matters because of hiring. The type of people rewarded with promotion at the top tend to promote those people and so on down the levels. A nontechnical CTO will start promoting nontechnical people managers and eventually you will have an org run by MBAs.
Re: A CTO should be technical
#7author doesn't understand management at all, nor silicon valley / tech company org structure model. ok sure, in a top down company, CTO better be uber technical.
remind me not to apply to any SPC companies, nor use their products
Re: A CTO should be technical
#8As others have mentioned and I agree as a company becomes bigger the job of a CTO goes from very technical (owning the project, making architectural decisions ) at startups to a really large company where the CTO has the large product(s) owner(s) reporting to them with their own cost and benefits analysis and from that justifying the capital expenses to the CEO.
Re: A CTO should be technical
#9Being "technical" is a full time job. The idea that anyone "above" you should be able to do your job is not only ridiculous, it's insulting to the engineers.
The CTO should be able to have an informed and intelligent conversation about technical issues at a high level, but expecting them to be able to write code is not realistic.
Re: A CTO should be technical
#10There's a point when "technical enough" comes back into the picture. A gigantic company with 50k employees the CTO is barely relevant to any real tech decisions. They are tangentially related but not "in-the-weeds" technical Contrast that to a tech startup, or any startup I suppose. Those CTO's absolutely need to be "in-the-weeds" capable.
I think it still matters because of hiring. The type of people rewarded with promotion at the top tend to promote those people and so on down the levels. A nontechnical CTO will start promoting nontechnical people managers and eventually you will have an org run by MBAs.
Yes for sure. But those non-technical, big company CTOs are going to be hiring people who need to be good at hiring people. Those are going to be your VPs of engineering types. THOSE people will be 'more technical' at that point. Those VPs of engineering are going to hire directors and so on down the chain. As you descend - it matters more and more that they are good technically. So if you're at a 50k size company, the CTO is so far from anything important that they operate at 'mba level with some technical acumen'. The smaller the company, the more important the role becomes.
Even at the company I worked at with 5000 people - the CTO was still nothing more than a glorified 'decider'. The company with 250 people - the CTO was far more necessary to be technical