[codegeek]

"When I approached the CEO, he basically acknowledged it's a problem and put it on me to bring it up with the CTO however I see fit."

I think the CEO needs to pay more attention to this. A bit of a red flag that the CEO dismissed this casually unless they think you are being unreasonable. If my team member brought to my attention that the CTO is not doing good, I would take that very seriously.

Having said that, you could try to understand what's going on with the CTO and that depends a lot on your own relationship with them. I would tread carefully though.

[headscientist]

I didn't flesh this out enough in the original post, but the CEO isn't actually dismissing it casually. He actually said this is really serious and said he thinks we should address transparently sooner than later. It's more that he's leaving it to me to figure out the right way to approach it. On the one hand, I appreciate him giving me some time/space to figure out how I'd like to approach it. On the other hand, I feel he's kind of shirking his responsibility and pitching it of to me.