from Hacker News

What does a CTO actually do?

by bndr on 7/21/23, 1:22 PM with 7 comments

• by roflyear on 7/21/23, 11:13 PM

  A CTO and a the VP of Engineering are very different roles. Traditionally the CTO is the person in charge of research, stays up to date with tech, and explores how to apply tech on a high level to business problems. The VP of Eng. is the person who is in charge of making that vision a reality (so implementation).

  And they both report to the CEO - if your VP of Eng. is reporting to the CTO that's a really bad thing.

  > I have a rule of thumb — the smaller the company, the less CTO has to deal with people, and the bigger the company, the less CTO has to do with technology. At some points on this spectrum — it’s either full coding or full strategy.

  This is just totally wrong. It's completely backwards. In a small company, the CTO is dealing with people and technology direction, because they are probably also doing VP of Eng. roles, unfortunately. This will not be good but may need to happen until someone else can step in. In a large company, the CTO should only be focused on tech, and should not be managing many people at all. That's the VP of Eng. job.

• by shove on 7/23/23, 8:14 PM

  Cocaine usually, but …