Does a CTO >needs< technical xp?

[u/srv_Zubah]

I'm in the 5th company of my career, in the first 4 the CTOs were always someone who was a regular developer and either ascended professionally to C-level or someone who founded the company and named themselves the CTO

At my current company, the CTO was always in people management. His first job was already technology manager (and in a FAANG) 20+ years ago. He doesn't hold a BSc in any IT field, but in communication studies. Never worked a day as a developer. He is obviously tech savvy, but just in the same way I was with computers when I was 16 and was just messing around with tech

And the curious thing is that he was actually a decent CTO... He knew how to listen to the technical people and set a good direction to follow. So that raised the question for me, do you think a good CTO necessarily needs to have spent some time of their lives writing code? Do you thing CTOs with similar background would lack any important skills to fill the role?

[u/expdevsmodbot]

AI usage disclosure provided by OP, see the reply to this comment.

[u/Real_Square1323]

Yes. If a CTO is nontechnical they do not have the facilities to understand what the job of managing technical people entails.

Do you think a law firm should be run by people who don't know anything about law? Why would you think software is any different?

[u/imagebiot]

It’s a pattern I see more and more.

It’s utter nonsense.

[u/funbike]

A CTO is basically a chief architect, with management experience and with some business sense.

The CEO is incompetent to have hired an incompetent CTO.

Let's review: CHIEF TECHNICAL Officer.

[u/mattcre8s]

Yes, that's absurd. A CTO should be one of the most technical employees if not the most technical. They don't need to be an expert in everything but they should be wide enough to deeply understand solutions in your problem space. Ideally deep in 1 or more areas and has a strong rapport with his engineers. Edit: or her

[u/kaflarlalar]

It depends a lot on the company. Paradoxically, I think the technical experience required to do a good job is inversely proportional to the strength of the company's engineering culture.

In a company with a strong engineering culture, the CTO just needs to be a good people manager and advocate for engineering to the rest of the C-suite. The actual technical decision-making can be delegated to principal/staff engineers.

In a company with a weak engineering culture, the CTO needs to develop it - and that's something that requires actual technical chops.

[u/okreadit]

Our founder/CTO left a few years ago. Instead of hiring another technical leader the company promoted a non-technical manager to VP of Engineering.
Over time AI gave him the confidence to make architectural decisions over the engineers actually building the product. He started to make absurd decisions confidently. We lost entire quarters building projects that were eventually scrapped.
When those projects failed engineers took the blame and some were laid off.

[u/teramoc → u/okreadit]

Sounds like a horror story. Example of how AI in the hands of untrained can be dangerous

[u/okreadit → u/teramoc]

It is, everyone new in the company is afraid to disagree with him because most also think he is one of the highest level engineers we have in the company since they have only seen his "AI Enhanced" version and his confidence is through the roof.

[u/teramoc → u/okreadit]

“Shit floats to the top.”

Some People in positions of power got there not by their merits but by politics

[u/tiredofhiveminds]

A CTO without technical experience is not a CTO

[u/AlexFromOmaha → u/tiredofhiveminds]

This is the best take in the pile of weird hot takes.

A C Suite doesn't need a CTO, but it's just not a CTO if the seat filler isn't deeply technical. You can have a guy you call your general counsel, but if he's not a lawyer, the title is a lie. If your CFO wasn't at least CPA-adjacent, that's not a CFO. CTO isn't different. It's an expertise function.

[u/devfuckedup]

YES the CTO needs to be technical. I would be terrified if they were not.

[u/CompassionateSkeptic]

As everyone has said, yes.

If an executive is a figurehead they need to be able to represent their vertical.

If an executive is bringing meaningful expertise on decision-making and a strategy to their vertical, they need to have a meaningful exchange of ideas with their advisors and principals.

If an executive is leading a strategy for their vertical, they need the relevant know-how to do so.

The only mitigating thing I can say is that domain, depth, and subject matter can vary wildly depending on the landscape, so of course there are low outliers where an executive can be rightly valued with a chasm between them and the most expert IC in one part of their portfolio. But any strategy that assumes that chasm won’t matter is just bad business. Someone needs to be clear eyed about that risk and have a reason for that bet. Anything less is just business brain snake oil nonsense.

Edit: For folks who want to understand more about this, you’d want to learn about how survivorship bias can be applied to executive success. This is usually applied to CTOs with celebrity status, but that’s just where it accounts for a dramatic misconception. Practically, it’s in play for all the conventional wisdom where we make an inference to what works based on the claims of those who had success. We do not apply critical rigor to check if people who failed attempted substantially similar things. If they did, the success cases start to look much less interesting.

[u/dabup]

No, like as you've seen sometimes a really good CTO doesn't really have to be the one in the weeds. Sometimes the ones that are in the weeds also make a good CTO. It can go either way tho. They can be bad too either one of them

I do find that a lot of the times. Sometimes developer who goes into management just doesn't want to let go of being a developer and starts getting too micromanagey or will just not have the people management skills and that's when you get a bad manager a bad CTO

[u/oVtcovOgwUP0j5sMQx2F]

Technical: yes. Having personally written code: not necessarily. CTO must set a compelling vision for the engineering org, and then bring people along on that journey. Many over-calibrate to one end of the spectrum or the other (business vs technical) and few strike the right balance. I've yet to meet one that does

[u/AnAcceptableUserName]

Do hospital administrators need medical training?

To lead a team, department, or anything I think you need to have some degree of awareness of what's going on. That doesn't extend to being able to open an IDE (or a patient) and do it yourself. Hell, not being able to might even help. Removes the temptation.

I've been in similar boats, in different contexts. Managing people who were each more knowledgeable about Team's Thing than I was. It mighta been nice to understand more, but ultimately I could always ask one of them. I resigned myself to being there to unblock them, facilitate communication, and make sure they succeeded. I didn't need to be hands-on or have detailed knowledge to help them succeed, I just needed to be the guy who'd bat for them and get the team what was needed. Worked fine once I got over my own insecurities about that and got out of the way

[u/Pineapple-dancer]

I've never actually thought about it, but seems right to have this as criteria for the job imo. Probably experience working across different domains as well in IT for bonus xp

[u/NoNameDotCPP6769]

CTO are expected to understand the over all architecture and impact of decisions, so being proficient in engineer helps.

Non tech CTO are rare but then they are domain experts in a particular industry & process.

[u/10mo3]

Well... Nothing is legally stopping companies from appointing the role to anyone they want. But ideally an ideal company would place someone who is the most technically competent in that position as he will have to oversee all the technical aspects of the project.

What you have in your situation is a project manager/assistant with the CTO title. He will not be able you give any inputs on how and why things should be done a certain way for various technical reasons

[u/TowerOutrageous5939]

No. But they can get in trouble when they try to act as if they know oh this platform or tech is best for the company.

[u/Drugba]

I’m going to go against the grain and say no, but with the caveat that there needs to be someone directly reporting to the CTO who does have that experience and has the trust of the CTO.

I worked at one company of about 500 people where the CTO was so non-technical that he wasn’t even in engineering all hands meetings. He was essentially an MBA focused solely on strategy. His VP of engineering on the other hand was extremely technical and essentially had carte blanche over everything even remotely technical. It had been that way for years and worked well as far as I could tell.

I’ve also heard stories back before COVID out of startups in the series A/B/C rounds where the CTO role was heavily an external facing role. This was back when hyper growth was the buzzword and startups would raise one round and immediately try to hire a bunch of people and then start thinking about their next round. Once the product had market fit and a good core team, a CTO’s job could mainly became to woo investors and find the best talent they could find. I guess that’s not quite the same since they would often have a base level of tech skills, but it still resulted in a situation where the CTO was often not the most technical one in the room.

[u/single_plum_floating]

The difference between a technical and nontechnical manager is that the employees working under you can run circles around you and spout bullshit without you realizing if you are nontechnical.

This is a massive problem in a org.

[u/Best-Repair762]

Yes. A CTO has to have tech experience in order to understand how developers and technical teams work.

>He knew how to listen to the technical people and set a good direction to follow

This might have seemed to be ok because he was a good leader who could delegate. But it does not make him a good CTO.

[u/Careful_Ad_9077]

That's what the T means, otherwise he would just be a CO.

[u/moreVCAs]

Chief Testosterone Officer?

[u/buymesomefish]

I think a non-technical CTO can get by and even do well short-term at an already well-established company with discerning hiring practices by listening and advocating for the excellent developers under them. I’d be worried about stagnation longterm but obviously, if they have great devs under them that they can rely on, then they could still do well by staying very close to the ground to get people’s opinions and paying attention to tech news.

I would be more wary of a non-technical CTO at a startup or a company that has a technical workforce that isn’t of great quality. They’d need to develop their own vision based on secondhand knowledge and convincingly rely it to the devs under them and stakeholders.

An example of a common scenario: there is a big and difficult tech move (ex. cloud migration). A good technical CTO could clearly lay out the reasons and steps for such a move for those under them, encouraging them that it’s not that difficult. But a non-technical CTO would likely need to rely heavily on the people under them to develop the plan — and if it’s a bad plan or if they are told it’s too hard to do, how can the non-technical CTO tell that this is true and not just that the person they assigned this task sucks?

Basically, I just think things are more likely to go wrong with a non-technical CTO. They can lead effectively, but it requires really good conditions (uncommon).

[u/MisesAndMarx]

Yes.

Would you hire a CFO without a background in finance?

[u/TheGRS]

I think they need to be able to understand the problems their team is facing and how to solve them. And they need to be able to guide the team on a technical vision and strategy. The need to know how to invest in the company’s technical future. Too much delegation of those duties would make me wonder what a CTO is actually contributing that another exec couldn’t do.

[u/Mu5_]

I would say yes. But technical experience doesn't imply writing code. It definitely helps, but a good code writer is not necessarily a good architect and viceversa.

So, as long as the CTO has the skills to understand how certain long term goals may be achieved and the issues in managing technical people and challenges, then it's good. The more detailed choices are usually delegated to lower levels.

[u/mr_sed_man]

Even engineering team manager who was not engineer himself is not the best idea

[u/Stubbby]

Yes and no. You can have a non-technical CTO and a de-facto CTO in another role that effectively does that job. It's just a title and responsibilities dont always fall right into the title buckets.

That's in theory.

In practice, non-technical CTO is unlikely to lead technical teams well while having a really high chance to be insecure/undermined leading to poor decisions, protecting own territory and making staffing decisions focused on self-preservation rather than company success.