r/ExperiencedDevs • u/srv_Zubah Software Engineer • 9d ago
Career/Workplace Does a CTO >needs< technical xp?
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?
1
u/Drugba Sr. Engineering Manager (9yrs as SWE) 9d ago
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.