Summary: CTO of a small company codes. I don't see any issues, and it's not surprising.
I've heard of plenty of CTOs coding at small startups, but the surprising part is he has no direct reports.
Why I code as a CTO
151–160 of 304 posts
Re: Why I code as a CTO
#152A CTO who codes and who has no reports?
Every hour they spend coding is time not spent doing the things only the CTO can do.
They really need to hire a programmer or two and focus on their job.
Re: Why I code as a CTO
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of Principal Engineers (L8) at Google who have no reports. In fact, I think the majority have no reports.
Most of those engineers, outside of ones who have extremely specialized knowledge or skills, are essentially managing others still just without a direct reporting chain. The commit log for most of these high-level engineers is extremely sparse. They're spending most of their time writing documents or influencing orgs, not writing code.
Yes. I was responding to the sentence "With no directs, even “principal” would be a stretch in any company of note." which talked about direct reports.
Re: Why I code as a CTO
#154Possibly unpopular, but this is an interesting topic, so I'll post my counterpoint. The question is: what are you not doing that is in the list of CTO responsibilities because you're coding? One of the reasons stated why you do this is "because you enjoy it", and on the list of reasons you need to do it is there are only a handful of people in the org that can ship new product surface area. That's...concerning. That…
So many things wrong with this sort of “CTO must not do what they enjoy but what is the list of responsibilities “ robotic thinking. So you think coding is not high leverage on a tech company. Do you even remember why your company exists anymore? Surely not to give people a living and let them be happy at work, according to you. Absolutely no, the only purpose of a company is to deliver value, but I bet you can’t eve…
I think me mentioning a list of responsibilities sort of derailed the conversation a little bit.
It's not about them avoiding what they enjoy. It's about empowering and scaling a human organization to take on larger and larger scope over time. And at a technical company, the CTO is uniquely positioned to understand organizational scalability and technical scalability. So the risk I see with a CTO that focuses predominantly on coding is that they may be neglecting higher impact work that they could be doing that would set the organization up to empower more people to do the kind of work that they think is necessary.
The other risk I observed with a CTO that predominantly codes is that they become a bottleneck and are not actually able to ship the really experimental and product-altering features that they envision, and so they end up handing off essentially half-done ideas to teams who are then responsible for picking up the half-done mess and getting it to something that's suitable for production. I think this is probably avoidable in some way, but I do think it's an intrinsic risk of taking on large projects as a single coder while having other responsibilities to the company.
Re: Why I code as a CTO
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the answer is in the blog: " I currently manage no direct reports and ship a lot of code. "
That’s not a role that I’d normally associate with “Chief” anything (which, by definition, means direct reports). More like Principal Engineer, or Architect. In smaller companies, this is probably fairly normal, but you can’t maintain this, as the company grows. I had a similar path, in my career. I originally started as a regular engineer, in a two-person team, and eventually ended up managing a small team of up to…
The happy medium that the CTO did at the company where I worked where I was the architect guiding the technical direction, he would do non production level experimental coding as research - integrations with third party APIs, see if an AWS service was suitable - to take some of the load off of me hand the code over to me and I cleaned it up and made it production ready and championed it to the rest of the teams.
He still helped accelerate efforts, got his coding fix when he had time, wasn’t in the critical path of any work, and he made the entire org better.
Re: Why I code as a CTO
#156This reads like an engineer that got promoted to his level of incompetence.
Re: Why I code as a CTO
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of those engineers, outside of ones who have extremely specialized knowledge or skills, are essentially managing others still just without a direct reporting chain. The commit log for most of these high-level engineers is extremely sparse. They're spending most of their time writing documents or influencing orgs, not writing code.
Yes. I was responding to the sentence "With no directs, even “principal” would be a stretch in any company of note." which talked about direct reports.
Oh, I see now.
Re: Why I code as a CTO
#158Man, if I'm trying to decide which company to work for, and I see a blog post from its CTO crowing about regularly checking in code on Saturdays and Sundays, I'd start backing slowly away. And when I got to the bit that said "AI has made me three times as productive," I'd turn and run. Your job at the top is, more than anything else, pushing down a healthy culture. That includes things like setting an example of not…
I code as a founder/CTO on weekends, I don't expect weekend work done by anyone else and most people rarely check in if ever on weekends. The job profile of founder-CTO has not a lot of overlap with that of an individual contributor to be leading by example, the overlap is quite narrow even for senior engineering leadership. Until recently[3] leaders with prior coding skills were always discouraged from code contribu…
If you want to work on the weekend - and occasionally I find myself doing so as a staff level IC consultant who does need to spend an inordinate amount of time mentoring, project management, suppprting sales, interviewing candidates, babysitting clients, etc… - don’t send messages on Slack or email outside of business hours. I schedule messages to go out Monday morning and I never mention I worked on the weekend.
I don’t want to set the expectation that people should work outside of business hours or that I’m willing to.
Re: Why I code as a CTO
#159Man, if I'm trying to decide which company to work for, and I see a blog post from its CTO crowing about regularly checking in code on Saturdays and Sundays, I'd start backing slowly away. And when I got to the bit that said "AI has made me three times as productive," I'd turn and run. Your job at the top is, more than anything else, pushing down a healthy culture. That includes things like setting an example of not…
What’s your gripe with the part about the AI productivity boost? For anyone working in fairly standard web dev tech, I’d say it’s more of a red flag if a boss denies the productivity boost of these tools (at least when used by senior devs)
Re: Why I code as a CTO
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Staff engineer. Founders don’t necessarily need to hold CXO titles to work in the startups they founded.
A few examples that spring to mind, Steve Wozniak and Mitchell Hashimoto
I recall James Goodnight of SAS coding while being a CEO. As per https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2014/05/12/an-intervi..., he still programs from time to time but doesn't have a specific part in development. In looking at the articles to refresh my memory, it is clear he is one of the good CEO's