| Which one, or at least which company? :) Anyways, I think that CTOs should code until their organization is large enough that they are off of the frontlines and can manage their engineers to make progress. When the company grows further, they can focus on new technologies, pet projects, and pinch hitting. Once they're technologically behind the curve, they should move on to a new thing. My intuition is that a CTO kind of goes through 3 phases, mostly as a function of available resources (and I'm just spitballing headcounts here): 1. Prototype and initial product development (0-3 engineers, call it). CTO is end-of-line responsible for meeting business deadlines, creating lean version of product, and training others on the product architecture (because bad things happen to good people at the worst times). CTO has put in first set of policies for managing projects, workflow, and suchlike. CTO has to code every day, because there aren't enough hands around and because the overhead of explaining things in sufficient detail to others dwarfs the immediate business returns. 2. Engineering growth (4-35 engineers). CTO has somebody running mainline development, and is responsible now for either pinch-hitting on hard product problems/legacy that hasn't been transferred over to new people or for improving the daily lives of their engineering team. This is the time to scrub out legacy mistakes, to write and document things so that others can learn and build quickly, and to fix problems in the workflow as they become obvious. CTO might still lend a hand for some projects, but they should be focusing on making others productive and coordinating with business. 3. New frontiers (36-150 engineers). CTO has senior engineers and leads who can handle everything up to a year's worth of planning, and no longer needs to be involved in the day-to-day (except to make sure the front-lines are happy). Engineering culture (established previously) should now be on second- or third-generation employees, and no longer needs tight management. CTO is now free to look at new development lines, new emerging technologies, and maybe start small teams to work on proofs-of-concept for different ideas or product rewrites. CTO probably can go back to daily coding, because there are now people who are handling the management and planning of everything else. CTO gets to try out new things again and think of long-term issues. 4. Yacht-time (150+ engineers). Seriously, what are they doing? Sell their shares and buy a goddamned yacht already. :) ~ That's my thinking on it. |