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Comment by willio58 | Hacker News Reader

> I currently manage no direct reports and ship a lot of code.

This is a wildly different status than almost all other people with this title.

I’m glad this person still likes coding, and they seem to be great at it, but this role doesn’t match up to the title. This doesn’t really matter until he wants to switch jobs and realizes near zero CTO positions outside of this one company will require few meetings and zero management. He’d have to change title to principal engineer or something but an article titled “Why I code as a Principal Engineer” doesn’t quite grab attention the same way.

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It seems possible that most CTOs are in tiny startups, don't have reports and we don't know about them because, having no reports, they don't get a lot of visibility compared to someone at the top of a 10,000 person org chart.

But the article framing is still odd. If the CTO has no reports who is going to do the coding other than the CTO? The reason the CTO is coding is because, being CTO, they want technical things to happen. He can't farm it off to his reports because they don't exist. Case closed. The real question is why doesn't he feel hiring some people to code is a good idea. 1 highly capable report could probably +30%, 40% his productivity.

With no directs, even “principal” would be a stretch in any company of note. If he spends that much time “coding”, that barely qualifies as a “senior” at large tech companies.

There are plenty of Principal Engineers (L8) at Google who have no reports. In fact, I think the majority have no reports.

Let me clarify. I know there are principals with no directs. I’m more calling out that the “scope” of a principal is a high bar at Big Tech and if he is spending all of his time coding at a startup, I doubt that he is working at the level of a principal at BigTech.

My own anecdote is that the level of work I was doing as an “architect” at a 60 person startup where I was the second technical hire when the new CTO was hired to bring tech leadership in house from a third party consulting company mapped to a mid level L5 consultant at AWS ProServe (to be fair I only had two and a half years of AWS experience at the time I was hired by AWS) and now while I’m a “Staff consultant” at a third party AWS consulting firm with around 1000 people, looking at the leveling guidelines and expectations at my current company, AWS and GCP, it maps to a “senior”

Most of those engineers, outside of ones who have extremely specialized knowledge or skills, are essentially managing others still just without a direct reporting chain.

The commit log for most of these high-level engineers is extremely sparse. They're spending most of their time writing documents or influencing orgs, not writing code.

Yes. I was responding to the sentence "With no directs, even “principal” would be a stretch in any company of note." which talked about direct reports.

Oh, I see now.

Yeah 60% coding 40% managing juniors is basically what senior dev has looked like me for the past few jobs, even at smaller (~15-30 employees) outfits

This is staff, principal, or even EM scope at many orgs. I have never seen anyone with a senior dev title directly managing juniors.

Always interesting how much job title and responsibility varies. Part of why it’s almost always best to go ahead and apply and dig into what the responsibilities would be, rather than see the title and assume it’s not what you’re looking for. I’ve been surprised more than a few times about what people think titles mean.

It's definitely not super uncommon where I'm at. CTOs, especially those that founded companies and are more technical doers than managers, that end up having responsibility for architecture and technical matters (tech lead deluxe), but no people (due to lack of people management and leadership skills/or desire for that kind of job - sometimes also product management skills at larger organizations).

Not much is worse than working somewhere that a higher up is squatting a job title that they don't want to do. It just causes a dysfunctional lord of the flies situation where lower people fight for the reigns to get what they want.

Sounds more like a "distinguished engineer" ?

No it isn't. Lots of CTOs don't have reports.

really? like who?

Both in my own personal direct experience and in 15 years of consulting, primarily for tech startups, the modal CTO I encountered had in reality a product manager role with a special title that was helpful in important pre-sales meetings --- and they did not tend to be the de facto VP/PM.

what's the most effective model you've seen?

I think CTO as "other, better-defined kind of exec, but with a funny hat" is a perfectly cromulent model. I think CTO as "PM that customers feel flattered to talk to" is another perfectly cromulent model. To me, "CTO" is almost an honorific, or like a title of nobility.

I've been at several companies that have a CTO and a Director of Engineering. The CTO sets the strategy, and the Director of Engineering handles the execution. In theory the Director "reports" to the CTO (I.e. is under in the org chart), but not necessarily. Sometimes the Director reports to the CEO, and/or takes a more collaborative role with the CTO.

This does not apply at my current company, where the CTO has their title as an artifact of how the founding team was structured, but if I was founder/early at a company, progressed to a senior role, and then was told that I should take a role where I "set engineering strategy", I would immediately conclude that I was being managed out. "Strategy", in particular, is the kiss of death.

I have a terribly hard time understanding the effectiveness of a CTO who has no reports, especially in a technology company.

What is it that you think a CTO does? There isn't a standard answer to this question.

CTO is usually the exec responsible for the entire tech org. The CTO reports to the CEO, and the top managers and maybe a few ICs in the tech org report to the CTO.

It's very common to see a VP of Engineering managing the day-to-day operations while the CTO acts in a capacity like this.

I’ve seen that too, but then the VP of Engineering tends to report to the CTO, and not to- say, the CEO directly.

Dotted line reporting is very different. In these instances the VP/E is usually directly interfacing with other executives as the CTO's peer. This is even more true when the budget is managed by the VP/E and the CTO is more customer/sales facing.

You're saying "usually" about something that has definitely not been a norm in my career. It seems like there's really only two ways to interpret that arrangement: either the CTO is in fact the EVP/E (fair enough! lots of CTOs are other exec roles with a funny hat), or the CTO has a single top-level manager report, in which case what really happened is that the org hired a pro to run engineering and put the "CTO" out to pasture.

I was CTO of a <20 person startup. I recruited the entire tech team, collaborated with the CEO to build the product backlog and spec things out, presented to investors, but also had at least 50% time to code. Not all “CTO” roles are the same. At a small company they better be hands on.

This is very similar to my own role, but I didn't have (nor would I have accepted) that title.

On my resume, I usually list it as “Lead Engineer” since it fits the roles I’m applying to better.

I think a founder/early gets away with "CTO" on their resume, esp. if they're the only person in the org with the role (ie: it's a PM-style CTO, and there isn't a VP/PM; or: it's a VP/E-style CTO, and there isn't a VP/E). But outside that circumstance, given the choice, I'd rather have the VP/PM or VP/E role than "CTO".

(As we get deeper into these threads I am further out on a limb.)

Yes, I was one of the first hires. My role was closer to VP/E and "CTO" was mostly vanity, a reward for being early and getting a new company through the first couple years.

CTO without reports is just a "developer".

Exactly. Most CTO's have tens if not hundreds of direct reports that rely on them regularly. Which is why their time must be used to support them leaving absolutely 0 time to do PR code contributions on the side (unless you work weekends).

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