[endymi0n]

Dude, chill.

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.

[askoxyz]

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.