If you are a hacker, then try to just hack the suckiness out of the job. Take a mental step back, and look at the business as a large computer, everyone's crap

If you are a hacker, then try to just hack the suckiness out of the job. Take a mental step back, and look at the business as a large computer, everyone's crap as bugs, fires as serious bugs and dealing with other managers as a high level architectural/resource allocation problem. Then get to hacking! Refactor the program (your role and tasks) until its running smoothly (i.e. you're happy) then start adding features. Learn to apply (not so shiny) new technologies (management methods, time management, people management). Set up a test suite to compare what you want to what you actually get. Red - Refactor - Green. (Seems like all your tests would be a solid red at the moment:) Do top down and bottom up analysis - make specs for what you want as a CTO, and make specs for what you'd want (as a programmer) from an ideal CTO. Set up your own performance benchmarking suite with the metrics that matter to you: Fun factor, coding opportunities, battle to relax ratio, etc... Just make sure to stay ethical, DRY and most of all, keep it interesting and fun. No black hat hacking when dealing with people. (Oh, and if you know parallel programming, start a new thread called $JOB_SEARCH to run concurrently while you do all this) P.S. I've trained (successfully) quite a few new managers, specifically highly experienced technical staff that move into new positions of management. The most recent one I did was for a global telco hardware provider. I can send you some of my workbooks (for a 3 day course, covers the main basics about moving into management and being happy and great at it) if you want to hit me up - email is in my profile. I pinkie swear I won't out your real profile, or you can just set up a throwaway email if you're really worried.