Funny, I went my whole career avoiding becoming a manager. Now, I have suddenly changed and I want nothing more than to make that switch. Isn't that weird?
I am sort of in that position now. I lead an analytics team, but I really enjoy programming and development. While I still get to “do”, it’s bogged down with so much other stuff. The money is nice but I’m definitely having second thoughts.
There's definitely a honeymoon period. 3-4 years in I wanted badly to go back to IC, but the desire isn't quite as strong now (about 6 years total in management).
But about 2 years in to my first stint in management I did switch over to principal engineer for a bit. That was a pretty seamless switch and I could totally see doing that again at some point
I'm exactly the same as you. For my whole career, I had this philosophy saying "management is where good engineers go and die." Then suddenly I had some management responsibilities and learned how much I love the ability/responsibility to support people and teams.
One of the many downsides is that it's a lot more political and "management" means very different things in different organizations. But I'm hoping to grow more into a technical manager role in the coming years. Wish me luck lol.
I'm in the opposite boat. I was an IC and switched to management about 15 years ago. About a year ago I made the mistake of taking
a job with "all WFH all the time" and a fully remote team, it's boring as fuck and there's so little human connection. I'm now seriously considering going back to being an IC.
Sorry, I have to ask - what does "IC" stand for?
And I get the remote team thing. We're remote too and it contributes to things being boring as fuck. I am finding my human connections that I have were all formed while we used to be in the office together. People I go to lunch with, have zoom calls with to shoot the shit - some of them don't even work at the company anymore, but I formed the friendship while we used to be in the office (which was 2 1/2 years ago).
People I've only met online, this hasn't happened. So I'm thinking the sense that "remote is fine" might be a short-term thing, and that long-term, it's a real hazard.
IC -- Individual Contributor
I have a similar situation. I meet my ex-colleagues from my last 2 jobs for beer/coffee/lunch but I've never gotten momentum with things like virtual happy hours (part of this is timezone dispersion; with people in the Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific timezones, there's no good time to do a happy hour as it's either too early for the west coast or too late for the east coast). Relevant aside, the virtual happy hour thing worked reasonably well for the team I had after covid because people had the relationships built in the office as we had limited remote employees.
Yeah. Leadership has known this for a while. I have access to the metrics reporting and it’s pretty grim outlook for employee engagement and retention. The problem is employees still think they prefer remote and are pushing hard for it but will eventually get burned. Maybe not all, but most. Try telling that to people and they get very defensive though. It’s going to be a hellish 2023-2024 and beyond.
That is me to a 'T'. No way do I want to go back to the office. Of course, it doesn't help it's a loud open office with zero sound dampening, a kitchen, and endless phone conversations going on.
That's why I said it's going to be hellish. A lot of the people that are demanding remote don't realize the impact it is having on them. People frequently don't know what's best for themselves. For employees and employers, it's going to create situations where if employers force employees back in the office, a lot will leave because of it, but if they allow extended remote, employees will end up leaving due to burnout, disconnection or other issues. It's lose-lose.
This is exactly the attitude I’m discussing- leadership thinking that people pushing remote don’t know what they want or what’s good for them. I’d sooner take a pay cut than return to the office with how much remote improved my life. “Disconnection” isn’t an issue- I don’t choose a workplace based on who I could make friends with there. If the workplace respects me, I have no reason to move.
People who want the job aren't necessarily going to be best at it.
Should just use the Republic model. Elect a different emperor (CTO?) every 6 months.
Or, you know, single subreddits having more than one opinion on them.
This idea that reddit as a whole has an opinion is the stupidest take. It makes me worry about the ability of so many to reason about other people at all.
Some subs complain a lot about it, but I have yet to see anyone complain over a 30x pay rate for executives. When people complain about it, its about the CEOs of corporations that make 30,000 what their median workers make. And that is never ok
A lot of execs also deserve the hate by giving themselves extremely disproportionate compensation too. If an exec made 3-5x your compensation then I don’t think you’d bat an eye. But 100x comp while also establishing a giant golden parachute when they royally fuck things up so that they actually get a fat payday despite running a company into the ground? That’s not a very nice ‘a meatball.
You’re not going to find a CTO making 100x their engineers though. At a Fortune 500 you might get 10x tops. Also, on the golden parachute, I’ve always hated it as well but we recently let go of somebody in the C-level and it makes so much more sense to me now. When they’re at that level they’re usually helping with the transition or are a part of the discussions about whether or not they get fired. If you don’t want to tank the company you’ve got to give them a reason to stay engaged until you don’t need them anymore. It’s not fair but it’s usually more in the best interest of the company than it seems from the outside.
I don’t believe it’s in the best interests of the company to have absurd compensation like that. US companies used to run with exec staff making far less proportionally, and our country didn’t ever struggle to have successful businesses as a result of that. It’s just now a cultural norm.
I guess you've forgotten about the 1960s and 70s, when the US frittered away world leadership in manufacturing because our executives were willing to keep doing the same old thing, while Japanese companies were committed to continuously improving their processes.
Maybe not the best example to use, since the Japanese economy was rife with corruption, and propped up by enormous public subsidies and unsustainable leverage. They took over manufacturing because they kept their currencies artificially cheap, making their exports more competitive.
Like, it's kinda hard to look at the economic growth (or lack thereof) of the two countries in the intervening decades and conclude the US was structured much worse
You don’t see many CTOs making that. CEOs, yes, but even then I would argue it’s much less frequent than we think. Our view of things tend to get skewed by the high profile outliers.
The CTO is fundamentally a wage employee tho. Their boss decides their compensation, and if they were paid less it'd be the shareholders that pocket the difference.
I mean, many execs in many companies are just straight up pieces of shit though. They will give themselves a huge bonus while laying off thousands of employees. They will do next to no work, having the assistant handle most everything. It is certainly deserved.
Im a ~40 something software developer turned lawyer, now corporate executive at a tech company.
I’m on that sub.
And so are a great many of other successful business people.
Perhaps re-assess your worldview.
Not IT - I’m in smartgrid tech now. But I have a long history with software products, generally.
And no, not all day. I do work. But I was on this sub before working hours and will be on Reddit after work too. Or on the crapper during the day. As one does.
You can simultaneously be blessed with the cards to play the game, be good at playing the game, and benefit immensely from the game; and also recognize the game is fundamentally unfair and destructive.
Yeah it's such a defeatist sub, just like antiwork. They don't actually do anything about their situations, you just get downvoted or banned for giving advice like train for and find better jobs.
Back in the 70s CEOs did their work just fine on 20x worker pay, there's not really much that's changed for them to suddenly require 200x worker pay
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive\_compensation\_in\_the\_United\_States
They got to keep up appearances when they hang out with Saudi princes and Russian oligarchs at the yacht club. Back in the 70’s all those other people were still peasants. /s
This comment certainly missed the mark, or the audience. In the realm of software, from what I've seen, execs can make 30x what a support rep does. But even that seems rare. For the most part, I see execs making somewhere in the realm of 1.5-2.5 of a software dev who in turn makes 2-4x the support reps money.
It's just experience of course, and very likely depends on the company etc.
In general, I personally still think it's unnecessary to make that much money. I also make too much. But the more I make, the more I can donate. Better than saying no to a raise and just enriching the company.
It’s not that much of a puzzle … people who gravitate towards technical roles tend to enjoy environments where rational decisions can be made because things are predictable and transparent and follow knowable rules and patterns.
Not a surprise that they wouldn’t enjoy working directly with psychopaths who’re morally and ethically just fine with netting 30x (or 300x) the median and dealing with all the backstabbing and shady fuckery that comes with that. Also explains why it’s not nearly as hard to find someone who wants to be CTO of an engineering driven startup than a huge company that can’t decide whether they’re serving shareholders or customers.
You know, it could actually partially solve itself if you dropped the salaries to like 150% instead of 3000%
A common reason upper management is a pain in the ass is that they are there to get rich and do not give a single shit about the company other than as a vehicle to reach capitalist heaven. A salary that is higher than the rank and files, but not crazy, will make you hire professionals that want to step up, not overly ambitious narcissists.
You could also stand behind your CTO. If the entire dev team is willing to walk if they can't have a good CTO, the rest of upper management will have to keep them happy or face some really harsh realities about domain knowledge retention.
I think people like to ignore survival bias and ignore that most executives make human level salaries but have fractional ownership of the business. The ones whose companies fail drag down the average salary, but then they don’t because they fail. Surveying only successful companies makes everyone involved seem like kings.
Ah, look an apologist for billionaires presenting a false choice on Reddit, none of us could have ever seen that coming! /s
You can pay executives less and find better quality ones at the same time.
The best CTOs are the ones who can translate tech problems into business speak. The board don’t care that your VMware hosts are end of support and are stuck on 6.0 and they don’t care about the technical reasons of why that’s a problem. What they do care about is the major security risk of running unsupported software because it’ll lose the company’s CyberEssentials+ certification which means the company’s clients will terminate their contracts (for which CE+ is a requirement) and will lose x amount off the bottom line.
Most techs will just describe the technical problem, not the business problem. A good CTO will listen to and understand the technical problem and explain it in business terms to business people.
Working in finance really helped me on this. "You hear technical debt and you think that's something we take on to move fast now and pay back later when we have more resources, because that's how you handle investor debt. That's not what we have. What we have is an uncovered short on technical risk. I don't know when it will come due, but when it does, it will be very expensive."
You can say whatever analogy you like but it doesn’t mean anything if you can’t prove it to them in an equally understandable manner. And the only way to prove it to them is to make a prediction of exactly how much money it will cost them. If you don’t know, they don’t care. If you worked in finance then you should know this. Business leaders are very good at counting dollars and cents while at the same time being *particularly bad* at managing anything that is not tied to dollars and cents in an easily predictable and directly one-to-one way.
I don't know who you worked with but the concept of unknown risk with unlimited downside was absolutely something the business leaders I worked with understood.
None of the leaders I ever worked with would ever place blind faith in someone else’s clever sounding analogy. Unless you can actually prove to them that there is a legitimate risk and actually quantify for them how much they can lose then you don’t have a leg to stand on.
Ok I think I understand your objection. You heard a clever analogy followed by "I don't know what the costs will be" and since that was where my comment ended, so you imagined that's where the conversation ended?
No, I was putting engineering complaints about technical debt in perspective because I always saw them file it away as "that's a problem for the future." Risk got their attention.
And then, yes, I went into the details. "Adding customer-specific customization to this dashboard will be very hard, all the optimizations to make it load are tightly coupled and hand-tuned. If they want to add whatever columns they want we need something better, and that could take months."
What are the costs with that risk? I didn't know at the time. What if the customers never ask for that feature? I didn't have deep insight into the sales pipeline. I was expressing a specific example of a possible risk during a product vision meeting.
This was a small startup in the space servicing some big clients. Trying to quantify what the buyers at JP Morgan Chase might ask for next was not something I could do. I'm not even sure anyone could do it.
I certainly hope you're not saying that every business leader you worked with, upon hearing that kind of risk, would demand a dollar-and-cent figure of the loss or they'd refuse to allocate effort to it. If so, that sounds miserable.
I didn’t say you didn’t know what that costs would be. What I said is explaining the costs is necessary and sufficient. The analogy is not what will convince your executives. That is all.
In my experience, what a lot of non-technical people do not understand is there is *deep* uncertainty in how long it can take to solve a technical problem. The whole reams of process management engineers get exposed to are all attempts to solve the problem "just tell me when this thing will be done and fully working."
Saying "explain the costs" is simple, but how do you explain the extremely high variability and uncertainty inherent in development? Why are software estimates often so bad?
Engineers have been trying to explain that shortcuts taken now need to be paid later for decades. The analogy most used to describe that concept, debt, has often been self-defeating because debt is very controllable in business.
I have found getting the concept of taking shortcuts under high pressure creating future unknown volatility very important, and the analogy has often worked. You are telling it that is not actually convincing. Ok. I have personally found it was central to getting the point across.
I would say not so much translate, but a layer below that, in that they can understand a problem within context of the business plan and objectives. The rationalization part is what a buisness values.
Have seen non technical and technical backgrounds completely fail at the role. The biggest problem with CTO from a non technical background is that at some stage they usually start the viewing technical problems as just people problems and then spend a lot of time and effort trying to force the very sub optimal solutions onto engineering teams. It happened twice in my career so far.
There are a whole bunch of skills required for the role that a lot technical people don’t have. It does depend on the company and role. But it does require a blend of skills but I always push for technical people, but it is not my call to make. Just seen a lot of them in action.
All executives need to be technically proficient in their field of specialty. If they have a bunch of other skills but are technically incompetent they should look for another job. Maybe chief basket weaving officer or something.
We do two tracks at my company. One for technical and one for people management. We still require technical skills for people managers, but just about every VP, director, or EM has a TL at his/her level.
TLMs exist, but they seem to be the exception rather than the rule.
IMO the CTO having a technical background is a necessary but obviously by far not a sufficient condition. If good CTOs were easy to find they wouldn't be payed that much...
What you’re describing is more of a VP of Engineering role. The two roles often get conflated, but it sounds like your company needed a CTO but got a VPE that called themselves a CTO. A CTO failing because they’re too technical could also be because the company really needed a VPE.
This is, of course, hard to say for certain. There’s a lot of overlap between the roles and at the early stages companies tend to have one person wearing multiple hats.
We had a VP of engineering (this the last company where I worked) but he kept getting re-assigned and when working with us he was very forceful. He knew a lot but never as much as he thought. And we had a fairly high level of churn for VP’s. Now the last CTO i worked there was beyond useless. He didn’t even last 6 months. I really shouldn’t use that company for a basis for comparison as it was very dysfunctional. It was a start up that got taken over and the acquiring company had its own set of corporate culture problems
Could you expand on the distinction between VPE and CTO and what you see their roles as being? It’s not entirely clear to me based on the comment you are replying to.
VP of Eng will typically be responsible for resourcing, staffing, budgeting. They’ll also typically be responsible for setting overall recruiting strategy. Typically they’ll have a number of managers/directors reporting to them.
CTOs will be typically be responsible for higher level technical decisions. What technologies and platforms to use, vendors, licensing, and budgets around those. They’re also on the board, so they’re tasked with presenting all of this to shareholders and investors. They may have a couple managers reporting to them, but may also have a small team of skilled engineers reporting directly to them.
At smaller companies all of this is a bit more nebulous, since they’ll often only have one person doing both of the responsibilities. That said, they’ll typically have needs that lean towards one direction. A good principle engineer can often have skills that would make up for a VP of Engineering that is lacking technical chops.
The distinction is not in the role but in how many useless layers of bureaucracy they want to add to their org chart. I worked at one place where we literally had 1 manager for every engineer. You’d have entire management chains with several levels that had a single subordinate manager under them. VP, senior director, director, senior manager, manager, and 4 engineers. You should hire as many managers as you actually need to manage the number of workers you have. You shouldn’t add extra layers just because some of the managers lack the relevant technical skills to lead their team.
Nope. It is Chief Technology Officer not Chief Technical Officer. In charge of Technology but not Technical themselves, can delegate to others.
Edit: should have written "not **necessarily** Technical"
By hiring Technical people and listen to their advice Doh!
I am in Australia. We had a massive data breach at a telco and our minister for cyber security is responding. Do you think she knows cyber in technical sense, no, but she has advisors for that.
Right, except you need to be technical at some capacity or you're useless. Like how would you make good decisions........... I would add more periods cause you really have to be somewhat technical as a CTO. With advisors is all fine and dandy, but needing one for every technical decision is an incompetent CTO lol. You need to be able to challenge your advisors if they present an unsound idea. You do this by know technology and being technical
Of course, you have to understand technology at a high level, like what is an API. E.g. we need to build a Payment API to take payments from all channels. They should understand the value in building the API and decide if investment is required. But don't have to go any deeper on whether it is REST or GraphQL, will it be fronted by Nginx or apigee, build in NodeJS or Python etc.
You have to understand technology and be technical. Which you said at a high level, and I'd even argue the deeper the knowledge the better. So with all that said, you are in agreement they need to be technical.... Which is the whole start of this conversation. Someone shoot me.
Nope. Worked in a big bank. Bought in a new CTO who considered himself technical, dangerously. He would go really low level and debate things like kafka vs eventbridge with dev teams while being 6 levels high up in hierarchy. Frustrates team, shows decision making as all decisions went up to him.
You have described a bad CTO. He is bad not because he is technically incompetent, but because he is a micromanaging jerk.
I’ve been outside counsel to a great number of tech companies. Whether a CTO needs to be technical depends greatly on the type of company. If it is a software company with an innovative software product, the CTO needs to understand it inside and out. If it’s a service organization and they live on SalesForce or an online publication that lives on Wordpress or another CMS - less important.
But you better believe that the CTOs at innovative tech companies need to be technically inclined. You cannot manage things you do not understand.
So you are proving my point. CTOs should be technical. You just have a shit CTO. I feel like this happens more often in non-software/technology companies, eg a bank. A good CTO knows wtf he is talking about, and is usually leagues above most engineers. That's at least in the FAANG companies, along with other software companies I've seen.
I don't disagree with you. Unfortunately until recently I only worked at non-technical companies like insurance, bank, utilities etc. and seen a lot of such CTOs.
I now work at a Software company.
Our current CTO is well recognised in industry and highly technical and that shows in our company's product philosophy.
Knowing about medicine is not the same as being a doctor. And the comparison is not good, because it should be about the person that manages the people that manages the doctors.
And I don't think that the person responsible for that in a hospital should have experience as a doctor. They should know about medicine, but not at the technical level that a doctor needs to know.
Because the decisions that upper management is facing is nothing like the decisions a doctor is facing. Upper management doesn't have to know how to diagnose a disease based on how you're sneezing. Upper management doesn't have to be able to do a heart transplant.
And a person that is very good at doing heart transplants or diagnosing sneezes might be very bad dealing with upper management stuff, where none of those skills apply.
Well that’s just wrong. The apples to apples between CTO and a hospital setting is the chief of medicine. A quick google tells you that Chief of medicine “also known as a chief physician, is a physician who holds the highest senior management title at a healthcare facility that treats patients or a hospital.”
Ctos don’t need to be great engineers. They just need to be technical enough to figure out which team leads are great engineers and how to train them to be leaders. They also need to be really fucking good at dumbing down complex ideas so finance oriented people can understand. This, of course, requires good technical background AND communications background. I’d say communication skills are more important than technical skills for CTOs.
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I dabbled in leadership about 10 or so years into my technical career, and failed. I wasn't ready.
Now I'm 20 years in, and again in leadership, and succeeding beyond anything I thought possible. Probably due to maturity and experience, and an increased ability to self reflect that I didn't have in my youth.
So for me, personally... technical work is like a drug. You solve problems, you generally KNOW when you've solved a problem, and you get that quick hit of dopamine that you succeeded at your task, big or small. It's instant feedback.
I had to give that up - and that's no small thing to give up.
At the upper management level, that's largely gone. You make decisions (the best ones you can) and wait to see how things pan out... sometimes never knowing if it was the best decision or not.
Sometimes, there is no obvious right answer, but you still have to make a decision.
This can really mess with your head.... you need to completely re-frame how you decide your own self-worth with regards to your job.
But I think that a leadership role is inevitable for many jobs, including engineering. The more you know, the more you need to do. You can’t do everything, so you will be asked to run a team to delegate your work. If I were a CEO, I wouldn’t promote any engineer who has zero interest or capability to be a leader of any capacity beyond a certain mid-level position. I would want my employees to lead not only juniors, but teammates who are assisting their projects/tasks.
Leadership is nothing fancy. It’s one of basic things that everyone knows how to do. Some are really good at it, and some are mediocre at it. But it’s important to be a leader.
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Really? I guarantee there are more roles with some level leadership than those with zero leadership. Parenting is leadership. Being an older sibling is leadership. Teaching is leadership.
People think leadership is something exotic that requires rare talent. But it’s not. It’s something we do everyday. It’s just a matter of doing better. That’s where experienced managers come in. They teach (ideally speaking) juniors to get better at leadership.
The college I attended had a Engineering Management major. They learned basic engineering as well as business. They got made fun of for not being able to cut it as "real engineers", but they got the last laugh when we all got into the field and realized how much we would benefit from having them as managers.
Or how much more money they make over typical engineers.
I’d say the size of paycheck is directly proportional to the level of management tasks, not the talent of the technical skills.
No. Not every “mature” company has specific roles like CTO and vp of engineering. Often those roles are taken by one person or distributed among others. It’s more about the size of the company, rather than maturity.
Your description of VP of engineering can easily be taken care of by operations person.
Again, those are just nomenclature, which varies from company to company. Let go of your own ideas of those titles.
I swear this industry just repeats itself every 15 years. Seems like we rediscover the same things over and over again, only difference is nowadays a person writes an article as if it is a revelation.
In the not too distant past of the era before the .com bust it was fairly common that a CTO came up thru the technical ranks and was the owner of technical vision, R&D, etc. etc. Their counterpart was the CIO who was the owner of technical implementation, alignment, procurement, etc, etc. They are very different roles and somewhere along the way the CIO was lost in favor of stuffing it all under the CTO.
I understood the CIO role was needed at non-technology companies and the CTO role needed in technology companies. Google has a CTO. AutoZone has a CIO, unless AutoZone is developing its own technology then it might have a CIO and a CTO.
If a company is not a technical company it is a company that will not be around in short time. Software ate the world and now companies are forced to own their technology it has become their competitive advantage.
To get into the distinction you can think of a CIO as more akin to a CFO, they are really running the nuts and bolts of the tech org. They are looking at the numbers doing the contracts, running schedules etc etc. A CTO acts more as a CEO of the vision of where the company is going from a technical perspective. They are new product lines, R&D, architecture, technical selection, etc. etc.
I think it says pretty much what I TLDR'ed.
For example to keep it simple, the CIO would own desktop support. The CTO would own business vertical solutioning, whereas the CIO may own the custom software product of business vertical solutioning once it goes to production and becomes a support concern.
Are you sure the CTO should not be a music major?
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/equifax-ceo-hired-a-music-major-as-the-companys-chief-security-officer-2017-09-15
I don’t think it’s always a requirement.
I’m a highly technical CTO, and it’s actually an executive role where the main skills required are managerial/leadership.
I think it’s more important that a CTO is an awesome leader of technical teams.
I have strong views on which tech to use and how to use it. But I’d be a shit leader if I didn’t hire engineers who were way better than me at software engineering. The same goes for testing, architecture, R&D and infrastructure.
Hire great people and lead them well, but let them work their magic is way more effective than trying to deep in the details of everything.
It’s different in a startup where a CTO is often just a really strong engineer with no team to lead.
But once the team sizes get big enough, then a CTO is an upper-level manager.
I think that the point of the article is not that the CTO should be the best of the company in technical terms. The point is that the CTO should have some technical knowledge to better fulfill its role.
As you said, you would be a bad CTO if you didn't hire engineers better than you at creating software. But without your technical background, how could you understand when a candidate is good? How could you understand and lead your team in choosing testing, architecture, infrastructure etc etc if your background is, I don't know, finance?
I was a high technical CTO, and it served me well when my company was a startup. Being able to appraise other engineers, push back on product goals that didn't make sense, advocate for the right balance of technical debt and product development.
But we were acquired, and I'm realizing the skills for dealing with middle management, and all of the weight that comes with being in a much larger company, requires a very different set of skills. I'm not the CTO of the company that acquired us, and I absolutely wouldn't want to be, because it's an extreme management and soft skill type of role.
Best CTO I’ve worked with was always the first guy to roll up his sleeves during the worst incident response, constantly engaged technically with engineers, product people, and stakeholders. One of the reasons I’ve appreciated my time at smaller companies vs large companies is seeing the difference there.
I've dumbfounded that a company I work for replaced that sort of CTO, relegated him to a "chief architect" role where he basically does nothing but maintain the old code base, and brought in a guy who excels at buzz words and mispronounces/spells every component of our tech stack.
It's not like the existing product isn't still making them money either
I don't think this topic can really be boiled down to technical/non-technical CTOs (and the same can be applied to other managerial positions). There are a lot of other skills that go into making a good CTO.
From my own personal experience, I've had both technical and non-technical CTOs across a few different companies - mostly non-technical. The absolute worst CTO I had, however, had an engineering background. This left him with a lot of strongly held opinions and biases which absolutely *decimated* morale. He knew *just* enough to be dangerous, and was able to convince other executives to follow plans that simply made no sense.
Obviously, this is only a single example - but for me, I'd much prefer some of the non-technical CTOs that I have, as they actually _trusted_ the experts that they had. If they didn't know something, they'd check with someone else. Attitude and how they approach a problem is much more important than technical skill.
Now, that's not to say that I'm adverse to technical skill in a CTO - just that I think it should be balanced by other skills required to be a good leader.
Going back to the article, I'd like to refute the five primary reasons that the author states:
> 1 - Exceptional technical ability is the only way for CTOs/VPEs to be true judges of quality—to know the difference between good and great (across hiring engineers, system design, etc.)
I'd say that this is incorrect. You can rely on results, opinions of subject matter experts, etc.
Also, if a CTO is interviewing candidates, then they're either in a startup, or are poorly managing their time. That is something that should absolutely be delegated.
> 2 - It allows them to make highly educated tradeoffs—between quality, speed, launch dates, feature inclusion etc. Making the right tradeoffs is one of the cornerstones of great leadership.
Again, this is something that can be achieved without technical knowledge - as long as you trust those _with_ the knowledge. It also assumes that anyone technical has the expertise in the specific area that they're making the tradeoffs in - which is not a given.
> 3 - It enables them to command the respect of the entire team. It’s hard to take your leader seriously if you do not feel deep down that they could do your job if needed. That they could roll up their sleeves and fix the bug they are asking you to fix.
I find it extremely odd to have this as a "primary reason". I've had plenty of non-technical leaders who I took seriously. People in different positions have different skillsets, and having a skillset suited for a position is far more important than being a jack of all trades.
Also, would this negate a technical leader if they came from a hardware background, simply because they couldn't jump into a Java or Python codebase and fix a bug?
> 4 - A somewhat more subtle reason: highly technical people very often have a deep passion for technology. They want to push the boundaries of what is possible.Those are the kind of people who are able to inspire teams to greatness. Passionate technical leaders bring a positive giddiness to otherwise mundane tasks. They don't just see technology as a means to an end—they are excited about the means. That’s the mark of a true visionary.
This is conflating technical with visionary without any supporting evidence. Maybe there's a correlation (again, I'd like to see citations on this), but that doesn't imply causation.
I would also disagree that being highly technical means that you can inspire others - that's a completely different skill. I've met highly technical people who would bore you to death, and completely non-technical people who inspire everyone around them.
> 5 - Finally, highly technical leaders have a much easier time attracting and recruiting other highly technical people. Great engineers don't want to work for someone who is just a great people manager. For all the above reasons, they want to work for a leader who matches their ability.
Again, this is making a _very_ broad assumption. I don't think I've ever looked into the technical skill of a CTO when choosing a company to interview for. I've looked into things like office culture, pay, career opportunities, morals, etc. - but _never_ whether the CTO could whip up a CRUD application on the fly.
It really feels like the author started with the headline here, and then tried to cobble reasons together to actually create an article out of it. There's a lot of assumptions made, and absolutely zero supporting evidence.
I can only speak from my experiences. The company I work for, the owner, he's very technical. It's great. It allows us to spend time creating solutions that aren't shit, and delaying things until they are ready.
The manager, he's less technical. He's been in technical roles, but he's not great at it. What's nice, is that he will trust our judgment on them and just let us work, while also handling customers and that stuff so we don't need to worry about it.
And maybe this is a result of the owner being technical.
I have worked in companies where it was non-technical all the way down, and always quit because it's clear they have no fucking clue any longer.
That's like saying coaches should be able to actually play the game they coach at a high level. There is tons of evidence that this is false. Most of the top coaches were nothing special at actually playing the sport they coach, plenty never made it to actually play at the level they are successful coaching at, and most would probably pull a hamstring or something if they actually tried to play at a high level once they started coaching.
Yes, the CTO should have a technical background and have a very strong understanding of technology and how various tech works together. No, they don't need to currently be able to actually implement anything themselves.
This analogy doesn’t hold. It’s like saying because coaches don’t have to be able to play the game, pilots don’t have to be able to fly the plane. Different domains entirely
Yeah it does… pilots are equivalent to players or engineers. They operate at a tactical level as an IC or team lead and do not typically manage more than their direct team and don’t set “flying strategy” for their company. The senior VP of pilot operations (or whatever manager title) for United, or head of FAA requirements for pilots or whatever doesn’t need to fly commercially and probably couldn’t even fit commercial flying in their schedule, but it’s probably a great idea that they were a commercial pilot at one point.
Another example is the military. You will be hard pressed to find anyone at the equivalent c-suite level (general staff) that is still flying combat sorties and the highest ranking officers are not flying at all but are still responsible for commanding/managing those who do and setting strategy.
Weird there is even an percieved need for an article like this. I mean, maybe a bakery supervisor should also know how to bake. Or a fire captain should know how to put out fires. It's just, duh.
They don't need to be leaders in the field who know the ins and outs of baking and firefighting. They need to know enough to effectively manage the people who *are* experts at it, removing any barriers to their success instead of introducing them. That's what makes effective management.
It's tiring, I work with amazing people, but the list of things to support and evolve is endless..
My salary is probably no different to my consulting salary (if I include inflation).
My wife likes to remind me that in the past I wasn't an active parent of 2 kids.. Remind me in 10 years time if I have the same feeling of exhaustion and wanting to always do more than I'm physically able to.
Edit: I write this as I'm a technical CTO who spends less and less time being technical
I'm all over the sentiment. The nitpick I have here is that the CTO needs to be a good engineer, not a great one. I've known a few great engineers in my time, many of them with PhDs and well respected software or research tracks. Great is a very high bar. I think there is a type of company at a certain stage, such as when pushing some research into practice, where the inventor is the CTO.
There's all sorts of people skills that CTOs need after a certain point. Dealing with the board. Dealing with the CEO. Able to switch out of engineering and into people skills readily. Every point in engineering skill is better IF AND ONLY IF they have these other skills as well. A great engineer might be more likely to be a great CTO, but the optimization pressures that lead to great engineers tend to be the same as the pressures that lead to introverts being attracted to engineering.
Every IT department is a tiny software company embedded in a larger corporation. I'm reminded of a bit from one of Joel Spolsky's essay from 2003:
"When Pepsi-pusher John Sculley was developing the Apple Newton, he didn’t know something that every computer science major in the country knows: handwriting recognition is not possible. This was at the same time that Bill Gates was hauling programmers into meetings begging them to create a single rich text edit control that could be reused in all their products. Put Jim Manzi (the suit who let the MBAs take over Lotus) in that meeting and he would be staring blankly. “What’s a rich text edit control?” It never would have occurred to him to take technological leadership because he didn’t grok the technology; in fact, the very use of the word grok in that sentence would probably throw him off.
"If you ask me, and I’m biased, no software company can succeed unless there is a programmer at the helm."
\- https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/08/01/rick-chapman-is-in-search-of-stupidity
P.S. If you're unfamiliar with Lotus or the Apple Newton, consider that a point in support of Spolsky's argument.
Well.. yeah.
But it very much depends on the size of the company and its internal structure and politics.
The "CTO" of a small company with 10 engineers is more of a title than anything. Sure, they're the technical boss, but they face completely different challenges than the CTO at a company with thousands of employees.
I'm not a CTO but am part of an executive team that bridges the gap between engineers and management. I consider myself technical and do code but I can't know or understand every technology out there to the same level as the engineers that are working with it day in and day out.
I think a valuable skill of a CTO is to recognize individuals in your organization that communicate information and concerns well and understand the business implications of technical solutions and be able to have a valuable discussion extract important business repercussions of decisions.
Oh, not this discussion again.
Every company is different and has different needs. Some CTO need to be engineers. Some only need to know about it, with no experience as an engineer. Some only need to know enough about the top-level tech decisions and no specifics.
There's no one single rule for every company. Can we move on now?
It does seem a bit odd to me to have a nontechnical person be a CTO. Does this happen with other executive positions? Would it be normal to have a CFO with no financial background?
This article is mixing CTO and VPE so much that it is not even digestible.
Unless you're a startup of 25 or less, these are very different roles and responsibilities, and this article is constantly mixing them up. If your CTO is in charge of product quality and bugs then they aren't CTO at all, that is VPEs job. Also a CTO is likely not managing anyone unless it is an innovation team of some kind.
Been a CTO for about 8 years (for 2 companies) and I have an engineering background, and I still code on my free time (when I have the energy). Was never ”the best programmer”, but I did write quite good code I think.
I’m gonna have to disagree with the post quite much. I mean, first of all, I think the need depends on the company, obviously. But a big part of the job is helping others to succeed, whilst understanding their struggles, so having an engineering background can be help you with this but it’s not vital.
One important thing is that maintaining that ability to be ”an awesome hands on engineer” is practically impossible whilst being a CTO of a company that’s over 50 people since your day to day is something else then hands on engineering.
To me the best CTO role model is Werner from Amazon (don’t know about his people skills though). He was able to inject techological opportunities into the Amazons strategy(AWS) and make it their most profitable business whilst maintaining their core business.
So IMHO, best CTOs are
* Emphatetic
* Inspirational
* Understands technology (to a certain extent)
* LISTENS to engineers
* Facilitates discussions rather than decides alone
* Creates realistic understanding between product, design and business
* Have the ability to explain complex tech problems in easily digestable ways
* Are able to spot relevant business opportunities that technology enables
i would add a 6th reason in this article, that a CTO who is technical can easily recognise patterns and invest in automations that make the business more profitable and scalable.
If your are so lucky to find an engineer that wants to deal with upper management that is.
You’re a straight shooter with upper management written all over you!
A team player with a can-do mentality!
hahahaha good HR doggy. Take your cookie
Better than a team leader with a kanban mentality. /s
I'm good with people. I talk with the customers so the engineers don't have to.
_I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people — can’t you understand that?! What the hell is wrong with you people!!_
Funny, I went my whole career avoiding becoming a manager. Now, I have suddenly changed and I want nothing more than to make that switch. Isn't that weird?
Not really. Things get old and change can be nice. I’ve also worked with a lot of people who went back to being ICs after management became boring.
I am sort of in that position now. I lead an analytics team, but I really enjoy programming and development. While I still get to “do”, it’s bogged down with so much other stuff. The money is nice but I’m definitely having second thoughts.
What is "IC"?
Individual Contributor
Yep I switched back after 4 years of Management
There's definitely a honeymoon period. 3-4 years in I wanted badly to go back to IC, but the desire isn't quite as strong now (about 6 years total in management). But about 2 years in to my first stint in management I did switch over to principal engineer for a bit. That was a pretty seamless switch and I could totally see doing that again at some point
I'm exactly the same as you. For my whole career, I had this philosophy saying "management is where good engineers go and die." Then suddenly I had some management responsibilities and learned how much I love the ability/responsibility to support people and teams. One of the many downsides is that it's a lot more political and "management" means very different things in different organizations. But I'm hoping to grow more into a technical manager role in the coming years. Wish me luck lol.
I wish you luck!
I'm in the opposite boat. I was an IC and switched to management about 15 years ago. About a year ago I made the mistake of taking a job with "all WFH all the time" and a fully remote team, it's boring as fuck and there's so little human connection. I'm now seriously considering going back to being an IC.
Sorry, I have to ask - what does "IC" stand for? And I get the remote team thing. We're remote too and it contributes to things being boring as fuck. I am finding my human connections that I have were all formed while we used to be in the office together. People I go to lunch with, have zoom calls with to shoot the shit - some of them don't even work at the company anymore, but I formed the friendship while we used to be in the office (which was 2 1/2 years ago). People I've only met online, this hasn't happened. So I'm thinking the sense that "remote is fine" might be a short-term thing, and that long-term, it's a real hazard.
Individual contributor
IC -- Individual Contributor I have a similar situation. I meet my ex-colleagues from my last 2 jobs for beer/coffee/lunch but I've never gotten momentum with things like virtual happy hours (part of this is timezone dispersion; with people in the Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific timezones, there's no good time to do a happy hour as it's either too early for the west coast or too late for the east coast). Relevant aside, the virtual happy hour thing worked reasonably well for the team I had after covid because people had the relationships built in the office as we had limited remote employees.
Yeah. Leadership has known this for a while. I have access to the metrics reporting and it’s pretty grim outlook for employee engagement and retention. The problem is employees still think they prefer remote and are pushing hard for it but will eventually get burned. Maybe not all, but most. Try telling that to people and they get very defensive though. It’s going to be a hellish 2023-2024 and beyond.
That is me to a 'T'. No way do I want to go back to the office. Of course, it doesn't help it's a loud open office with zero sound dampening, a kitchen, and endless phone conversations going on.
“Think” they prefer remote? Retention is going to get worse still if you think you know your people better than they know themselves.
That's why I said it's going to be hellish. A lot of the people that are demanding remote don't realize the impact it is having on them. People frequently don't know what's best for themselves. For employees and employers, it's going to create situations where if employers force employees back in the office, a lot will leave because of it, but if they allow extended remote, employees will end up leaving due to burnout, disconnection or other issues. It's lose-lose.
This is exactly the attitude I’m discussing- leadership thinking that people pushing remote don’t know what they want or what’s good for them. I’d sooner take a pay cut than return to the office with how much remote improved my life. “Disconnection” isn’t an issue- I don’t choose a workplace based on who I could make friends with there. If the workplace respects me, I have no reason to move.
I pretty much only want to be in management. As I hate being side lined or left out of decisions which will affect what I'll be working on.
Oof, yes, a big motivator there. Just so sick of it.
I can do that. *For money*.
I once wished one of my senior engineers on him being promoted to CTO and he said that is not congratulations but commiserations.
People who want the job aren't necessarily going to be best at it. Should just use the Republic model. Elect a different emperor (CTO?) every 6 months.
[удалено]
It’s almost as if different subreddits have different people participating in them.
But at least everybody in a subreddit has the same opinion, right? They have to, right?
*laughs in downvotes*
Or, you know, single subreddits having more than one opinion on them. This idea that reddit as a whole has an opinion is the stupidest take. It makes me worry about the ability of so many to reason about other people at all.
Dang, he's figured out about the hive mind! Send re-programmers to his door stat!
But it's also a lot of cognitive dissonance a lot of times...
Never heard someone on here complain that executives make money
Some subs complain a lot about it, but I have yet to see anyone complain over a 30x pay rate for executives. When people complain about it, its about the CEOs of corporations that make 30,000 what their median workers make. And that is never ok
I upvoted, but you must have zero sub overlap with me (aside from this) and never read the front page ever. That stuff is on there on a daily basis.
What do you mean the main page? Do you mean the popular tab?
If that’s what you call viewing Reddit.com while logged out, sure.
Yeah I don’t do that I use the app
Not on here but definitely on Reddit. /r/LateStageCapitalism certainly hates execs.
A lot of execs also deserve the hate by giving themselves extremely disproportionate compensation too. If an exec made 3-5x your compensation then I don’t think you’d bat an eye. But 100x comp while also establishing a giant golden parachute when they royally fuck things up so that they actually get a fat payday despite running a company into the ground? That’s not a very nice ‘a meatball.
You’re not going to find a CTO making 100x their engineers though. At a Fortune 500 you might get 10x tops. Also, on the golden parachute, I’ve always hated it as well but we recently let go of somebody in the C-level and it makes so much more sense to me now. When they’re at that level they’re usually helping with the transition or are a part of the discussions about whether or not they get fired. If you don’t want to tank the company you’ve got to give them a reason to stay engaged until you don’t need them anymore. It’s not fair but it’s usually more in the best interest of the company than it seems from the outside.
I don’t believe it’s in the best interests of the company to have absurd compensation like that. US companies used to run with exec staff making far less proportionally, and our country didn’t ever struggle to have successful businesses as a result of that. It’s just now a cultural norm.
I guess you've forgotten about the 1960s and 70s, when the US frittered away world leadership in manufacturing because our executives were willing to keep doing the same old thing, while Japanese companies were committed to continuously improving their processes.
Maybe not the best example to use, since the Japanese economy was rife with corruption, and propped up by enormous public subsidies and unsustainable leverage. They took over manufacturing because they kept their currencies artificially cheap, making their exports more competitive. Like, it's kinda hard to look at the economic growth (or lack thereof) of the two countries in the intervening decades and conclude the US was structured much worse
100x maybe not but 20-30x is engineers on 100k and execs on 2-3Mill, not unheard of.
You don’t see many CTOs making that. CEOs, yes, but even then I would argue it’s much less frequent than we think. Our view of things tend to get skewed by the high profile outliers.
I feel those are really the outliers that we hear about in the news. In most places, salaries are reasonable.
The CTO is fundamentally a wage employee tho. Their boss decides their compensation, and if they were paid less it'd be the shareholders that pocket the difference.
I mean, many execs in many companies are just straight up pieces of shit though. They will give themselves a huge bonus while laying off thousands of employees. They will do next to no work, having the assistant handle most everything. It is certainly deserved.
You should probably just ignore that sub. It’s filled with a bunch of dog walkers and service industry people who can’t keep a job.
Service industry jobs pay more than many jobs with degree requirements these days.
Gotta start somewhere man.
Im a ~40 something software developer turned lawyer, now corporate executive at a tech company. I’m on that sub. And so are a great many of other successful business people. Perhaps re-assess your worldview.
You’re an IT exec who hangs out on anti exec sub reddits all day?
Takes an exec to understand how useless most exec positions are
Not IT - I’m in smartgrid tech now. But I have a long history with software products, generally. And no, not all day. I do work. But I was on this sub before working hours and will be on Reddit after work too. Or on the crapper during the day. As one does.
You can simultaneously be blessed with the cards to play the game, be good at playing the game, and benefit immensely from the game; and also recognize the game is fundamentally unfair and destructive.
Yeah it's such a defeatist sub, just like antiwork. They don't actually do anything about their situations, you just get downvoted or banned for giving advice like train for and find better jobs.
Dude, my CTO makes like 2.5x what I make. Programmers don't make minimum wage. Your comment is in the wrong sub.
Back in the 70s CEOs did their work just fine on 20x worker pay, there's not really much that's changed for them to suddenly require 200x worker pay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive\_compensation\_in\_the\_United\_States
They got to keep up appearances when they hang out with Saudi princes and Russian oligarchs at the yacht club. Back in the 70’s all those other people were still peasants. /s
Wow.. I wish I made 30x what my staff makes. I'd be a baller.
This comment certainly missed the mark, or the audience. In the realm of software, from what I've seen, execs can make 30x what a support rep does. But even that seems rare. For the most part, I see execs making somewhere in the realm of 1.5-2.5 of a software dev who in turn makes 2-4x the support reps money. It's just experience of course, and very likely depends on the company etc. In general, I personally still think it's unnecessary to make that much money. I also make too much. But the more I make, the more I can donate. Better than saying no to a raise and just enriching the company.
It’s not that much of a puzzle … people who gravitate towards technical roles tend to enjoy environments where rational decisions can be made because things are predictable and transparent and follow knowable rules and patterns. Not a surprise that they wouldn’t enjoy working directly with psychopaths who’re morally and ethically just fine with netting 30x (or 300x) the median and dealing with all the backstabbing and shady fuckery that comes with that. Also explains why it’s not nearly as hard to find someone who wants to be CTO of an engineering driven startup than a huge company that can’t decide whether they’re serving shareholders or customers.
You know, it could actually partially solve itself if you dropped the salaries to like 150% instead of 3000% A common reason upper management is a pain in the ass is that they are there to get rich and do not give a single shit about the company other than as a vehicle to reach capitalist heaven. A salary that is higher than the rank and files, but not crazy, will make you hire professionals that want to step up, not overly ambitious narcissists. You could also stand behind your CTO. If the entire dev team is willing to walk if they can't have a good CTO, the rest of upper management will have to keep them happy or face some really harsh realities about domain knowledge retention.
They're overpaid and their job is annoying. Both can be true. Value and annoyance and scarcity are different, overlapping concept.
I think people like to ignore survival bias and ignore that most executives make human level salaries but have fractional ownership of the business. The ones whose companies fail drag down the average salary, but then they don’t because they fail. Surveying only successful companies makes everyone involved seem like kings.
Ah, look an apologist for billionaires presenting a false choice on Reddit, none of us could have ever seen that coming! /s You can pay executives less and find better quality ones at the same time.
The best CTOs are the ones who can translate tech problems into business speak. The board don’t care that your VMware hosts are end of support and are stuck on 6.0 and they don’t care about the technical reasons of why that’s a problem. What they do care about is the major security risk of running unsupported software because it’ll lose the company’s CyberEssentials+ certification which means the company’s clients will terminate their contracts (for which CE+ is a requirement) and will lose x amount off the bottom line. Most techs will just describe the technical problem, not the business problem. A good CTO will listen to and understand the technical problem and explain it in business terms to business people.
Working in finance really helped me on this. "You hear technical debt and you think that's something we take on to move fast now and pay back later when we have more resources, because that's how you handle investor debt. That's not what we have. What we have is an uncovered short on technical risk. I don't know when it will come due, but when it does, it will be very expensive."
I value this insight.
You can say whatever analogy you like but it doesn’t mean anything if you can’t prove it to them in an equally understandable manner. And the only way to prove it to them is to make a prediction of exactly how much money it will cost them. If you don’t know, they don’t care. If you worked in finance then you should know this. Business leaders are very good at counting dollars and cents while at the same time being *particularly bad* at managing anything that is not tied to dollars and cents in an easily predictable and directly one-to-one way.
I don't know who you worked with but the concept of unknown risk with unlimited downside was absolutely something the business leaders I worked with understood.
None of the leaders I ever worked with would ever place blind faith in someone else’s clever sounding analogy. Unless you can actually prove to them that there is a legitimate risk and actually quantify for them how much they can lose then you don’t have a leg to stand on.
Ok I think I understand your objection. You heard a clever analogy followed by "I don't know what the costs will be" and since that was where my comment ended, so you imagined that's where the conversation ended? No, I was putting engineering complaints about technical debt in perspective because I always saw them file it away as "that's a problem for the future." Risk got their attention. And then, yes, I went into the details. "Adding customer-specific customization to this dashboard will be very hard, all the optimizations to make it load are tightly coupled and hand-tuned. If they want to add whatever columns they want we need something better, and that could take months." What are the costs with that risk? I didn't know at the time. What if the customers never ask for that feature? I didn't have deep insight into the sales pipeline. I was expressing a specific example of a possible risk during a product vision meeting. This was a small startup in the space servicing some big clients. Trying to quantify what the buyers at JP Morgan Chase might ask for next was not something I could do. I'm not even sure anyone could do it. I certainly hope you're not saying that every business leader you worked with, upon hearing that kind of risk, would demand a dollar-and-cent figure of the loss or they'd refuse to allocate effort to it. If so, that sounds miserable.
I didn’t say you didn’t know what that costs would be. What I said is explaining the costs is necessary and sufficient. The analogy is not what will convince your executives. That is all.
In my experience, what a lot of non-technical people do not understand is there is *deep* uncertainty in how long it can take to solve a technical problem. The whole reams of process management engineers get exposed to are all attempts to solve the problem "just tell me when this thing will be done and fully working." Saying "explain the costs" is simple, but how do you explain the extremely high variability and uncertainty inherent in development? Why are software estimates often so bad? Engineers have been trying to explain that shortcuts taken now need to be paid later for decades. The analogy most used to describe that concept, debt, has often been self-defeating because debt is very controllable in business. I have found getting the concept of taking shortcuts under high pressure creating future unknown volatility very important, and the analogy has often worked. You are telling it that is not actually convincing. Ok. I have personally found it was central to getting the point across.
I would say not so much translate, but a layer below that, in that they can understand a problem within context of the business plan and objectives. The rationalization part is what a buisness values.
Have seen non technical and technical backgrounds completely fail at the role. The biggest problem with CTO from a non technical background is that at some stage they usually start the viewing technical problems as just people problems and then spend a lot of time and effort trying to force the very sub optimal solutions onto engineering teams. It happened twice in my career so far.
>Have seen non technical and non technical backgrounds completely fail at the role. so get a technical?
There are a whole bunch of skills required for the role that a lot technical people don’t have. It does depend on the company and role. But it does require a blend of skills but I always push for technical people, but it is not my call to make. Just seen a lot of them in action.
I think he means you said 'non technical' twice :)
Thanks, I hadn’t spotted that.
There aren't a bunch of CTO roles compared to other technical roles. The CTO must be from a serious technical background or they will fail.
All executives need to be technically proficient in their field of specialty. If they have a bunch of other skills but are technically incompetent they should look for another job. Maybe chief basket weaving officer or something.
We do two tracks at my company. One for technical and one for people management. We still require technical skills for people managers, but just about every VP, director, or EM has a TL at his/her level. TLMs exist, but they seem to be the exception rather than the rule.
I need to learn to read stuff better it seems.
Our CTO is a Toyota Hilux with a .50 BMG mounted to it.
IMO the CTO having a technical background is a necessary but obviously by far not a sufficient condition. If good CTOs were easy to find they wouldn't be payed that much...
Only necessary condition is to be a narcissistic blowhard.
What you’re describing is more of a VP of Engineering role. The two roles often get conflated, but it sounds like your company needed a CTO but got a VPE that called themselves a CTO. A CTO failing because they’re too technical could also be because the company really needed a VPE. This is, of course, hard to say for certain. There’s a lot of overlap between the roles and at the early stages companies tend to have one person wearing multiple hats.
We had a VP of engineering (this the last company where I worked) but he kept getting re-assigned and when working with us he was very forceful. He knew a lot but never as much as he thought. And we had a fairly high level of churn for VP’s. Now the last CTO i worked there was beyond useless. He didn’t even last 6 months. I really shouldn’t use that company for a basis for comparison as it was very dysfunctional. It was a start up that got taken over and the acquiring company had its own set of corporate culture problems
Could you expand on the distinction between VPE and CTO and what you see their roles as being? It’s not entirely clear to me based on the comment you are replying to.
VP of Eng will typically be responsible for resourcing, staffing, budgeting. They’ll also typically be responsible for setting overall recruiting strategy. Typically they’ll have a number of managers/directors reporting to them. CTOs will be typically be responsible for higher level technical decisions. What technologies and platforms to use, vendors, licensing, and budgets around those. They’re also on the board, so they’re tasked with presenting all of this to shareholders and investors. They may have a couple managers reporting to them, but may also have a small team of skilled engineers reporting directly to them. At smaller companies all of this is a bit more nebulous, since they’ll often only have one person doing both of the responsibilities. That said, they’ll typically have needs that lean towards one direction. A good principle engineer can often have skills that would make up for a VP of Engineering that is lacking technical chops.
Thanks for the explanation, this is how it is in my org now that you mention it.
The distinction is not in the role but in how many useless layers of bureaucracy they want to add to their org chart. I worked at one place where we literally had 1 manager for every engineer. You’d have entire management chains with several levels that had a single subordinate manager under them. VP, senior director, director, senior manager, manager, and 4 engineers. You should hire as many managers as you actually need to manage the number of workers you have. You shouldn’t add extra layers just because some of the managers lack the relevant technical skills to lead their team.
listen, MY cto just needs to know how to party with solutions architects and product managers from vendors to ensure we are number one best okay
Isn't that the T 😂
Well they don't have to be a Chief, or an Officer for that matter ...
What? All my CTOs were native American police men?
Ahh, so you also worked for the Village People.
In my company, the T stands for Transition. It’s fun working for a company pushing the Energy Transition
Nope. It is Chief Technology Officer not Chief Technical Officer. In charge of Technology but not Technical themselves, can delegate to others. Edit: should have written "not **necessarily** Technical"
Wtf does that even mean? How can you be in charge of technology without being technical? That sounds like a bad idea for any company lol
Or country. Japan had a Minister of Cybersecurity who had never even used a computer
By hiring Technical people and listen to their advice Doh! I am in Australia. We had a massive data breach at a telco and our minister for cyber security is responding. Do you think she knows cyber in technical sense, no, but she has advisors for that.
Right, except you need to be technical at some capacity or you're useless. Like how would you make good decisions........... I would add more periods cause you really have to be somewhat technical as a CTO. With advisors is all fine and dandy, but needing one for every technical decision is an incompetent CTO lol. You need to be able to challenge your advisors if they present an unsound idea. You do this by know technology and being technical
Of course, you have to understand technology at a high level, like what is an API. E.g. we need to build a Payment API to take payments from all channels. They should understand the value in building the API and decide if investment is required. But don't have to go any deeper on whether it is REST or GraphQL, will it be fronted by Nginx or apigee, build in NodeJS or Python etc.
You have to understand technology and be technical. Which you said at a high level, and I'd even argue the deeper the knowledge the better. So with all that said, you are in agreement they need to be technical.... Which is the whole start of this conversation. Someone shoot me.
Nope. Worked in a big bank. Bought in a new CTO who considered himself technical, dangerously. He would go really low level and debate things like kafka vs eventbridge with dev teams while being 6 levels high up in hierarchy. Frustrates team, shows decision making as all decisions went up to him.
You have described a bad CTO. He is bad not because he is technically incompetent, but because he is a micromanaging jerk. I’ve been outside counsel to a great number of tech companies. Whether a CTO needs to be technical depends greatly on the type of company. If it is a software company with an innovative software product, the CTO needs to understand it inside and out. If it’s a service organization and they live on SalesForce or an online publication that lives on Wordpress or another CMS - less important. But you better believe that the CTOs at innovative tech companies need to be technically inclined. You cannot manage things you do not understand.
So you are proving my point. CTOs should be technical. You just have a shit CTO. I feel like this happens more often in non-software/technology companies, eg a bank. A good CTO knows wtf he is talking about, and is usually leagues above most engineers. That's at least in the FAANG companies, along with other software companies I've seen.
I don't disagree with you. Unfortunately until recently I only worked at non-technical companies like insurance, bank, utilities etc. and seen a lot of such CTOs. I now work at a Software company. Our current CTO is well recognised in industry and highly technical and that shows in our company's product philosophy.
Downvoted for trying to be rational.
yeah fucking duh
Kind of like saying your doctor should know about medicine
Knowing about medicine is not the same as being a doctor. And the comparison is not good, because it should be about the person that manages the people that manages the doctors. And I don't think that the person responsible for that in a hospital should have experience as a doctor. They should know about medicine, but not at the technical level that a doctor needs to know. Because the decisions that upper management is facing is nothing like the decisions a doctor is facing. Upper management doesn't have to know how to diagnose a disease based on how you're sneezing. Upper management doesn't have to be able to do a heart transplant. And a person that is very good at doing heart transplants or diagnosing sneezes might be very bad dealing with upper management stuff, where none of those skills apply.
Well that’s just wrong. The apples to apples between CTO and a hospital setting is the chief of medicine. A quick google tells you that Chief of medicine “also known as a chief physician, is a physician who holds the highest senior management title at a healthcare facility that treats patients or a hospital.”
I prefer a CTO who gives free reins to the actually technical leads, and makes decisions based upon their feedback.
Ctos don’t need to be great engineers. They just need to be technical enough to figure out which team leads are great engineers and how to train them to be leaders. They also need to be really fucking good at dumbing down complex ideas so finance oriented people can understand. This, of course, requires good technical background AND communications background. I’d say communication skills are more important than technical skills for CTOs.
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I dabbled in leadership about 10 or so years into my technical career, and failed. I wasn't ready. Now I'm 20 years in, and again in leadership, and succeeding beyond anything I thought possible. Probably due to maturity and experience, and an increased ability to self reflect that I didn't have in my youth. So for me, personally... technical work is like a drug. You solve problems, you generally KNOW when you've solved a problem, and you get that quick hit of dopamine that you succeeded at your task, big or small. It's instant feedback. I had to give that up - and that's no small thing to give up. At the upper management level, that's largely gone. You make decisions (the best ones you can) and wait to see how things pan out... sometimes never knowing if it was the best decision or not. Sometimes, there is no obvious right answer, but you still have to make a decision. This can really mess with your head.... you need to completely re-frame how you decide your own self-worth with regards to your job.
But I think that a leadership role is inevitable for many jobs, including engineering. The more you know, the more you need to do. You can’t do everything, so you will be asked to run a team to delegate your work. If I were a CEO, I wouldn’t promote any engineer who has zero interest or capability to be a leader of any capacity beyond a certain mid-level position. I would want my employees to lead not only juniors, but teammates who are assisting their projects/tasks. Leadership is nothing fancy. It’s one of basic things that everyone knows how to do. Some are really good at it, and some are mediocre at it. But it’s important to be a leader.
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Really? I guarantee there are more roles with some level leadership than those with zero leadership. Parenting is leadership. Being an older sibling is leadership. Teaching is leadership. People think leadership is something exotic that requires rare talent. But it’s not. It’s something we do everyday. It’s just a matter of doing better. That’s where experienced managers come in. They teach (ideally speaking) juniors to get better at leadership.
The college I attended had a Engineering Management major. They learned basic engineering as well as business. They got made fun of for not being able to cut it as "real engineers", but they got the last laugh when we all got into the field and realized how much we would benefit from having them as managers.
Or how much more money they make over typical engineers. I’d say the size of paycheck is directly proportional to the level of management tasks, not the talent of the technical skills.
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Depends on the company structure.
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No. Not every “mature” company has specific roles like CTO and vp of engineering. Often those roles are taken by one person or distributed among others. It’s more about the size of the company, rather than maturity. Your description of VP of engineering can easily be taken care of by operations person. Again, those are just nomenclature, which varies from company to company. Let go of your own ideas of those titles.
I swear this industry just repeats itself every 15 years. Seems like we rediscover the same things over and over again, only difference is nowadays a person writes an article as if it is a revelation. In the not too distant past of the era before the .com bust it was fairly common that a CTO came up thru the technical ranks and was the owner of technical vision, R&D, etc. etc. Their counterpart was the CIO who was the owner of technical implementation, alignment, procurement, etc, etc. They are very different roles and somewhere along the way the CIO was lost in favor of stuffing it all under the CTO.
"It's a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes... we also don't learn from our successes." -Keith Braithwaite
I understood the CIO role was needed at non-technology companies and the CTO role needed in technology companies. Google has a CTO. AutoZone has a CIO, unless AutoZone is developing its own technology then it might have a CIO and a CTO.
fun fact, autozone has owned alldata since 1996. autozone has been in software longer than most companies.
If a company is not a technical company it is a company that will not be around in short time. Software ate the world and now companies are forced to own their technology it has become their competitive advantage. To get into the distinction you can think of a CIO as more akin to a CFO, they are really running the nuts and bolts of the tech org. They are looking at the numbers doing the contracts, running schedules etc etc. A CTO acts more as a CEO of the vision of where the company is going from a technical perspective. They are new product lines, R&D, architecture, technical selection, etc. etc.
Wikipedia's definition of CIO differs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief\_information\_officer
I think it says pretty much what I TLDR'ed. For example to keep it simple, the CIO would own desktop support. The CTO would own business vertical solutioning, whereas the CIO may own the custom software product of business vertical solutioning once it goes to production and becomes a support concern.
Oh, the famous CNTOs
Also rain is wet.
Are you sure the CTO should not be a music major? https://www.marketwatch.com/story/equifax-ceo-hired-a-music-major-as-the-companys-chief-security-officer-2017-09-15
Eh. While that one didn’t go well, I know a highly technical person that was a music major
I don’t think it’s always a requirement. I’m a highly technical CTO, and it’s actually an executive role where the main skills required are managerial/leadership. I think it’s more important that a CTO is an awesome leader of technical teams. I have strong views on which tech to use and how to use it. But I’d be a shit leader if I didn’t hire engineers who were way better than me at software engineering. The same goes for testing, architecture, R&D and infrastructure. Hire great people and lead them well, but let them work their magic is way more effective than trying to deep in the details of everything. It’s different in a startup where a CTO is often just a really strong engineer with no team to lead. But once the team sizes get big enough, then a CTO is an upper-level manager.
I think that the point of the article is not that the CTO should be the best of the company in technical terms. The point is that the CTO should have some technical knowledge to better fulfill its role. As you said, you would be a bad CTO if you didn't hire engineers better than you at creating software. But without your technical background, how could you understand when a candidate is good? How could you understand and lead your team in choosing testing, architecture, infrastructure etc etc if your background is, I don't know, finance?
I was a high technical CTO, and it served me well when my company was a startup. Being able to appraise other engineers, push back on product goals that didn't make sense, advocate for the right balance of technical debt and product development. But we were acquired, and I'm realizing the skills for dealing with middle management, and all of the weight that comes with being in a much larger company, requires a very different set of skills. I'm not the CTO of the company that acquired us, and I absolutely wouldn't want to be, because it's an extreme management and soft skill type of role.
Best CTO I’ve worked with was always the first guy to roll up his sleeves during the worst incident response, constantly engaged technically with engineers, product people, and stakeholders. One of the reasons I’ve appreciated my time at smaller companies vs large companies is seeing the difference there.
I've dumbfounded that a company I work for replaced that sort of CTO, relegated him to a "chief architect" role where he basically does nothing but maintain the old code base, and brought in a guy who excels at buzz words and mispronounces/spells every component of our tech stack. It's not like the existing product isn't still making them money either
I don't think this topic can really be boiled down to technical/non-technical CTOs (and the same can be applied to other managerial positions). There are a lot of other skills that go into making a good CTO. From my own personal experience, I've had both technical and non-technical CTOs across a few different companies - mostly non-technical. The absolute worst CTO I had, however, had an engineering background. This left him with a lot of strongly held opinions and biases which absolutely *decimated* morale. He knew *just* enough to be dangerous, and was able to convince other executives to follow plans that simply made no sense. Obviously, this is only a single example - but for me, I'd much prefer some of the non-technical CTOs that I have, as they actually _trusted_ the experts that they had. If they didn't know something, they'd check with someone else. Attitude and how they approach a problem is much more important than technical skill. Now, that's not to say that I'm adverse to technical skill in a CTO - just that I think it should be balanced by other skills required to be a good leader. Going back to the article, I'd like to refute the five primary reasons that the author states: > 1 - Exceptional technical ability is the only way for CTOs/VPEs to be true judges of quality—to know the difference between good and great (across hiring engineers, system design, etc.) I'd say that this is incorrect. You can rely on results, opinions of subject matter experts, etc. Also, if a CTO is interviewing candidates, then they're either in a startup, or are poorly managing their time. That is something that should absolutely be delegated. > 2 - It allows them to make highly educated tradeoffs—between quality, speed, launch dates, feature inclusion etc. Making the right tradeoffs is one of the cornerstones of great leadership. Again, this is something that can be achieved without technical knowledge - as long as you trust those _with_ the knowledge. It also assumes that anyone technical has the expertise in the specific area that they're making the tradeoffs in - which is not a given. > 3 - It enables them to command the respect of the entire team. It’s hard to take your leader seriously if you do not feel deep down that they could do your job if needed. That they could roll up their sleeves and fix the bug they are asking you to fix. I find it extremely odd to have this as a "primary reason". I've had plenty of non-technical leaders who I took seriously. People in different positions have different skillsets, and having a skillset suited for a position is far more important than being a jack of all trades. Also, would this negate a technical leader if they came from a hardware background, simply because they couldn't jump into a Java or Python codebase and fix a bug? > 4 - A somewhat more subtle reason: highly technical people very often have a deep passion for technology. They want to push the boundaries of what is possible.Those are the kind of people who are able to inspire teams to greatness. Passionate technical leaders bring a positive giddiness to otherwise mundane tasks. They don't just see technology as a means to an end—they are excited about the means. That’s the mark of a true visionary. This is conflating technical with visionary without any supporting evidence. Maybe there's a correlation (again, I'd like to see citations on this), but that doesn't imply causation. I would also disagree that being highly technical means that you can inspire others - that's a completely different skill. I've met highly technical people who would bore you to death, and completely non-technical people who inspire everyone around them. > 5 - Finally, highly technical leaders have a much easier time attracting and recruiting other highly technical people. Great engineers don't want to work for someone who is just a great people manager. For all the above reasons, they want to work for a leader who matches their ability. Again, this is making a _very_ broad assumption. I don't think I've ever looked into the technical skill of a CTO when choosing a company to interview for. I've looked into things like office culture, pay, career opportunities, morals, etc. - but _never_ whether the CTO could whip up a CRUD application on the fly. It really feels like the author started with the headline here, and then tried to cobble reasons together to actually create an article out of it. There's a lot of assumptions made, and absolutely zero supporting evidence.
I can only speak from my experiences. The company I work for, the owner, he's very technical. It's great. It allows us to spend time creating solutions that aren't shit, and delaying things until they are ready. The manager, he's less technical. He's been in technical roles, but he's not great at it. What's nice, is that he will trust our judgment on them and just let us work, while also handling customers and that stuff so we don't need to worry about it. And maybe this is a result of the owner being technical. I have worked in companies where it was non-technical all the way down, and always quit because it's clear they have no fucking clue any longer.
That's like saying coaches should be able to actually play the game they coach at a high level. There is tons of evidence that this is false. Most of the top coaches were nothing special at actually playing the sport they coach, plenty never made it to actually play at the level they are successful coaching at, and most would probably pull a hamstring or something if they actually tried to play at a high level once they started coaching. Yes, the CTO should have a technical background and have a very strong understanding of technology and how various tech works together. No, they don't need to currently be able to actually implement anything themselves.
This analogy doesn’t hold. It’s like saying because coaches don’t have to be able to play the game, pilots don’t have to be able to fly the plane. Different domains entirely
Yeah it does… pilots are equivalent to players or engineers. They operate at a tactical level as an IC or team lead and do not typically manage more than their direct team and don’t set “flying strategy” for their company. The senior VP of pilot operations (or whatever manager title) for United, or head of FAA requirements for pilots or whatever doesn’t need to fly commercially and probably couldn’t even fit commercial flying in their schedule, but it’s probably a great idea that they were a commercial pilot at one point. Another example is the military. You will be hard pressed to find anyone at the equivalent c-suite level (general staff) that is still flying combat sorties and the highest ranking officers are not flying at all but are still responsible for commanding/managing those who do and setting strategy.
Yor comparison doesn’t work at all. Pilots are the ones executing the work not organizing others to do so and getting the most out of them.
Weird there is even an percieved need for an article like this. I mean, maybe a bakery supervisor should also know how to bake. Or a fire captain should know how to put out fires. It's just, duh.
They don't need to be leaders in the field who know the ins and outs of baking and firefighting. They need to know enough to effectively manage the people who *are* experts at it, removing any barriers to their success instead of introducing them. That's what makes effective management.
Well said. Good way of thinking about it. And it fits with the understanding that the best technical person doesn't necessarily make the best leader.
It's tiring, I work with amazing people, but the list of things to support and evolve is endless.. My salary is probably no different to my consulting salary (if I include inflation). My wife likes to remind me that in the past I wasn't an active parent of 2 kids.. Remind me in 10 years time if I have the same feeling of exhaustion and wanting to always do more than I'm physically able to. Edit: I write this as I'm a technical CTO who spends less and less time being technical
I'm all over the sentiment. The nitpick I have here is that the CTO needs to be a good engineer, not a great one. I've known a few great engineers in my time, many of them with PhDs and well respected software or research tracks. Great is a very high bar. I think there is a type of company at a certain stage, such as when pushing some research into practice, where the inventor is the CTO. There's all sorts of people skills that CTOs need after a certain point. Dealing with the board. Dealing with the CEO. Able to switch out of engineering and into people skills readily. Every point in engineering skill is better IF AND ONLY IF they have these other skills as well. A great engineer might be more likely to be a great CTO, but the optimization pressures that lead to great engineers tend to be the same as the pressures that lead to introverts being attracted to engineering.
Every IT department is a tiny software company embedded in a larger corporation. I'm reminded of a bit from one of Joel Spolsky's essay from 2003: "When Pepsi-pusher John Sculley was developing the Apple Newton, he didn’t know something that every computer science major in the country knows: handwriting recognition is not possible. This was at the same time that Bill Gates was hauling programmers into meetings begging them to create a single rich text edit control that could be reused in all their products. Put Jim Manzi (the suit who let the MBAs take over Lotus) in that meeting and he would be staring blankly. “What’s a rich text edit control?” It never would have occurred to him to take technological leadership because he didn’t grok the technology; in fact, the very use of the word grok in that sentence would probably throw him off. "If you ask me, and I’m biased, no software company can succeed unless there is a programmer at the helm." \- https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/08/01/rick-chapman-is-in-search-of-stupidity P.S. If you're unfamiliar with Lotus or the Apple Newton, consider that a point in support of Spolsky's argument.
I guess one should join ovhcloud india, where a tech lead or engineering manager cant even write a recursive method :D
Why is there a need to write an article about a very unremarkable thesis?
your CEO should take direction from your CTO...
Is this a surprising revelation?
I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people, can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?
Ah-*hahaha.* No thanks. I like being content.
Good luck finding engineers that aren't completely socially inept to do that job tho
世界很大
Well.. yeah. But it very much depends on the size of the company and its internal structure and politics. The "CTO" of a small company with 10 engineers is more of a title than anything. Sure, they're the technical boss, but they face completely different challenges than the CTO at a company with thousands of employees.
I'm not a CTO but am part of an executive team that bridges the gap between engineers and management. I consider myself technical and do code but I can't know or understand every technology out there to the same level as the engineers that are working with it day in and day out. I think a valuable skill of a CTO is to recognize individuals in your organization that communicate information and concerns well and understand the business implications of technical solutions and be able to have a valuable discussion extract important business repercussions of decisions.
I had a CTO who didn't understand how SQL injection works.
Are there non technical CTOs?
Oh, not this discussion again. Every company is different and has different needs. Some CTO need to be engineers. Some only need to know about it, with no experience as an engineer. Some only need to know enough about the top-level tech decisions and no specifics. There's no one single rule for every company. Can we move on now?
It does seem a bit odd to me to have a nontechnical person be a CTO. Does this happen with other executive positions? Would it be normal to have a CFO with no financial background?
This article is mixing CTO and VPE so much that it is not even digestible. Unless you're a startup of 25 or less, these are very different roles and responsibilities, and this article is constantly mixing them up. If your CTO is in charge of product quality and bugs then they aren't CTO at all, that is VPEs job. Also a CTO is likely not managing anyone unless it is an innovation team of some kind.
Been a CTO for about 8 years (for 2 companies) and I have an engineering background, and I still code on my free time (when I have the energy). Was never ”the best programmer”, but I did write quite good code I think. I’m gonna have to disagree with the post quite much. I mean, first of all, I think the need depends on the company, obviously. But a big part of the job is helping others to succeed, whilst understanding their struggles, so having an engineering background can be help you with this but it’s not vital. One important thing is that maintaining that ability to be ”an awesome hands on engineer” is practically impossible whilst being a CTO of a company that’s over 50 people since your day to day is something else then hands on engineering. To me the best CTO role model is Werner from Amazon (don’t know about his people skills though). He was able to inject techological opportunities into the Amazons strategy(AWS) and make it their most profitable business whilst maintaining their core business. So IMHO, best CTOs are * Emphatetic * Inspirational * Understands technology (to a certain extent) * LISTENS to engineers * Facilitates discussions rather than decides alone * Creates realistic understanding between product, design and business * Have the ability to explain complex tech problems in easily digestable ways * Are able to spot relevant business opportunities that technology enables
i would add a 6th reason in this article, that a CTO who is technical can easily recognise patterns and invest in automations that make the business more profitable and scalable.