[morsecodist]

This is such an interesting comment thread because people have such wildly different opinions and from my perspective the entire disagreement just comes from company size.

I am a "CTO" and I always put that in air quotes because I have one direct report and I spend the lion's share of my time doing IC work. I know what I do is not what people picture when they hear the title and I feel weird saying it. I use it because I do have to make the strategic technical decisions, there is no one else. When people are marketing technical B2B SaaS I am the one they are looking for.

From my perspective there just isn't nearly enough for me to do as a CTO to justify me not coding. If I were to hire someone just to manage them that would be an unjustifiable expense at this point. But I also get that as soon as we get to a reasonable size this would be totally unsustainable.

[51Cards]

This sounds like myself as well. We are a small dev team of 6 (in a company of 30), however I also have a partial ownership stake in the company. Even though I spend a significant part of my time on "CTO" style work (client meetings, market assessments, product overviews, roadmap planning, third party collaboration, etc.) there also isn't near enough of that to fill my time or justify my salary. I code and review like my team does, but I also oversee technical direction for our whole portfolio and the responsibility for that technical success or failure rests on me. As we grow the coding will decrease I'm sure, but I see a lot of people here criticizing from a perspective of larger companies where a CTO would be a full time responsibility. In our situation the title (as much as I often dislike it) represents my level of responsibility, if not directly the full scope of my role.