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by tanaylakhani 988 days ago
You may want to consider being hands on for a week or two in your current company. Best way would be to start a hackathon within the company or participate in outside hackathon, build something that can be useful to the company is some different tangent. Don’t just build features but something on a tangential lines or something that your team can use as a fun project.

After two weeks, you’ll likely work on it to complete the project. You can later decide if you like this more.

Few things to note with transition comes different pay scale. You may have less say in overall direction or even the best practices and standards.

I had transitioned from leading teams to IC role and had observed these things, so I can only imagine it for being a CTO to a contributor.

3 comments

> Few things to note with transition comes different pay scale. You may have less say in overall direction or even the best practices and standards.

Definitely be prepared to be paid less and have your opinion matter less.

But that may be okay. With less authority comes less responsibility. That may even be what you are seeking.

I've experienced this at my current org, where sometimes I'll just give a suggestion based on my experience. I am in a peer dept of the engineering org and see and hear a lot, but am not an engineer. My suggestion may or may not be heard and acted on. Which, to be fair, is exactly the same position when an engineer makes a suggestion about something in my wheelhouse.

I also think that performing this transition coupled with a move to a new company is probably a good idea. While it is fine to trial this with your current company, moving companies means a clean break. I can see folks deferring to you in the old org, making the new CTO's life more difficult.

I'll give it a try. Thanks.
Such a great idea