A CTO with 5–10 years experience is not necessarily an experienced CTO
I’ll explain:
I have now seen several people who have held the job title of CTO (often jumping from engineer/principal engineer to CTO) but without ever having held a TRULY STRATEGIC CTO role.
Not all people with 5–10 years experience as CTO will be like this, but a significant number are (from my experience of working with them).
They were usually promoted in startups or co-founded a startup and were given a CTO role but they never received any support or guidance on how to truly embody the role of CTO.
They never did truly and genuinely:
✓ scale themselves through people
✓ empower engineers to grow (the code base or themselves)
✓ have and create a vision and strategy for the company’s technology
✓ influence people upwards, sideways or downwards or externally
✓ make real business cases for any engineering spend
✓ and so on.
When you start to look deeply at how they spent their time during their 5–10 years as CTO, they usually:
✓ horded code as they worried about losing their value to the business if they hand over code and empower the engineers to move it forward
✓ allocated themselves the most interesting work — worked on the problems and the HOW themselves as they wanted the enjoyment of working on the most exciting aspects of tech development
✓ was particular about small engineering practices or tools which had no strategic importance to the business
✓ made the engineers feel scared to speak up
✓ swooped in to fix issues instead of showing the engineers how they’re fixing it and empowering them to do it next time without the CTO
✓ saw themselves as the Alpha Geek in the room who has all the answers, but not as a leader who guides people to find the answers considering the business case
✓ and on and on.
BUT… It’s not their fault!!!
These CTOs often study at prestigious universities like Oxbridge, Cambridge, Cranfield, Harvard and that approach made them so successful in an academic environment and even as an engineer and technical expert but… that doesn’t work in leadership.
The saying: “What brought you here won’t take you there” applies again and again.
I’m open to discussion: is having a CTO job title for 5–10 years enough to be an experienced CTO?
