I entirely disagree with your premise that a CTO should know as much about coding as a top developer.
No, a good CTO should have a broad understanding of technology and the development process; understand finance sufficiently to manage the budget of his department; have good communication skills so as to translate the needs of the business to the people who will be implementing the technology to support those needs; and be a good project manager so he is able to properly delegate tasks to those best suited to completing them, and keep his resources accountable.
He should certainly understand code, and perhaps even write code himself. But be able to replace any given person he manages? No. He does not need to be an effective coder. He needs to be an effective manager, and ideally a servant leader.
First off, to get hired as a CTO, you don't need to convince developers, you'll have to convince founders and investors. That's a whole different game, perfectly played by a few people I know who have equivalent (lack of) tech skills to the guy you're describing.
CTO roles can also be filled pretty differently. The most upper one I've ever dealt with (group CTO of a huge media corporation) visited us and was totally fascinated by this Scrum thing we did (which we had to explain to her). Pretty sure she couldn't code a single line. You don't have to, when your main business is overall strategy, representing and managing other CTOs, often times they'll hire MBA's rather than tech people for these upper echelon positions.
Then again, you're probably referring to a startup / small company CTO. While you should certainly have some deeper tech chops in order to be taken seriously by the people you hire, I can assure you it's almost impossible to stay at the level of coding proficiency of the people you hire when you're caring for architecture, strategy, clients, management and investor relations (due diligence etc.) at the same time.
Source: I'm CTO myself and I only hire people who are better coders than I am.
Good points. I guess it's a lot more like politics and a lot less like trying to win a developer of the month position and I agree that my understanding of a CTO is biased. Yes, the company he works for is small and he only manages people I can count on my one hand.
Wow, that is pretty painful. Short answer is getting hired as a CTO doesn't make you one, and there are people who fill the role but don't have the title, but perhaps most importantly the role isn't as well defined as some people think.
Sometimes people exploit that. Some companies are so desperate to hire they will give someone pretty much any title they want (as opposed to money) so you see people without a significant track record in some sort of executive title role. But in all cases it is what folks do with it, not the title. In pathological cases it gets weird. I met a person whose first job out of college was VP of Engineering for a 4 person company which he used to convince a 10 person company to hire him as their VP Eng, which he used a 20 person company to hire him as their VP Eng, up the line until he was hired by a 1500 person company as their VP Eng where he was fired shortly after being hired. He really didn't have any clue as to what was needed in that role.
That said, in "real" CTO roles there are several but they usually require someone who can both debate things in a business context and a technical context, or in sales oriented companie explain to the technical people of a client enough about the product so they will be comfortable buying it. In non-technical companies the CTO is often really just a glorified IT guy with a smattering of social network support to help marketing with their branding efforts. In very large enterprise companies there might he half a dozen CTO "titles" of which only 1 is actually an officer of the company as defined by the SEC.
But none of that really matters for this author's rant. I can't figure out if they are amazed, jealous, or disgusted at the prospect of this person for which they clearly have no respect whatsoever holding a job with a title which they clearly covet.
> Some companies are so desperate to hire they will give someone pretty much any title they want
Indeed. It looks strange when companies have C-level executives without being the "chief" of other layer of executives. Also can be a bad message to new hires: even if you become a better leader, better manager, we already have a "chief", so tough luck.
I'd say it's more important for a CTO to have soft skills than be a top-notch programmer. The job is about seeing the forest for the trees and properly directing people based on experience and basic knowledge.
The idea that a CTO is some sort of "super dev" who is the best coder in the company and a great people manager is like the 10x engineer myth. They might exist but they are pretty rare.
As CTO, I know enough programming to know bad practices and give general guidance to avoid major pitfalls (like, perhaps, exception handling and avoiding compiler warnings), but my job is to make sure people deliver a product that meets the overall company goals, and to manage people.
No, a good CTO should have a broad understanding of technology and the development process; understand finance sufficiently to manage the budget of his department; have good communication skills so as to translate the needs of the business to the people who will be implementing the technology to support those needs; and be a good project manager so he is able to properly delegate tasks to those best suited to completing them, and keep his resources accountable.
He should certainly understand code, and perhaps even write code himself. But be able to replace any given person he manages? No. He does not need to be an effective coder. He needs to be an effective manager, and ideally a servant leader.
I speak from experience, as a CTO.