[nostrademons]

The reason for a CTO to code isn't to get the code written; it's so that they understand what the primary hassles are when their employees try to get the code written.

In any large engineering organization, there are usually several architectural decisions made long ago (often, back when the CTO still coded) that are hampering the productivity of everybody else. Usually, these decisions are so ingrained in the system that nobody questions them, and even if they did, changing them requires the cooperation of many different people or even departments and no individual contributor has that much authority. The CTO is uniquely positioned to actually fix these problems, but when the CTO (or even CEO, if the company has a technical founder) doesn't code, he's usually completely unaware of them or their impact on the organization.