[nasalgoat]

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.