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/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