_small psa, this is a little ranty because I enjoy writing code and solving problems. I also enjoy teaching and leading engineers. So here comes my rant/opinion_
Over the years, ive slowly been working on what I see as the pedigree of a technical CTO. Which, as ive been told, in person and online isn't what the job is supposed to be. The CTO is a leadership position and that if you are coding you are doing things "wrong". While I don't disagree, as the amount of planning, meetings and ancillary discussions have overwhelmed my work life. I would posit that a technical CTO is still valuable as an engineering resource. But why?
Maybe this isn't you, but maybe it is. You've survived SOAP, Test driven development and a myriad of different challenges through your career and have come out the other side. Now, you sit in a meeting listening to the same tabs vs spaces conversations and its bland but you know what. You, probably, at one time cared and can provide a final directive. Even if that is that its a silly conversation and that we already have a style guide to direct the conversation.
But you have someone who you can relay on to keep these conversations from impacting the work and the bottom line of the organization.
Almost similarly to my first point. The technical CTO is going to have some ideas on IaC or getting the right island to start building your product/hut on. The engineering side of them are going to understand pricing across different PaaS offerings. They are going to know what happens when you adopt k8s to early and scaling. Its easier to get it right when you do it early in the process. Which also reminds me of
They aren't going to have the 'force' used on them when they see a slow app. Or let the fact you have no observability into your application. Or all the lovely day 2 operations work that the team hasn't deemed necessary. Well, as a technical CTO, you can just add that. You can go into the codebase an instrument. This doesn't mean your are an SRE, or a developer, you just know that its what you need to have confidence in your application on production
As a person who has spent a huge chunk of their career trying out different hats across engineering organizations, I love being a technical CTO. Its been hard as teams grow to actually do less and lead more. I miss the dopamine hit of finishing bugs and I enjoy getting into the weeds on a problem. But does mean im an impediment to my team. I don't think so, I look at the backlog, far down the line and work to find incredible hard problems that don't need solving right now and start cracking at them over time.
I love that I can sometimes put six months of effort into an issue thats moves our little product a little further. Its what you should do as a technical leader. You don't have to lose all those skills you've built towards, you can still IC and lead. I personally don't believe them to be mutually exclusive.
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updated: 30 November 2023.