My last CTO of a 70 person company was in his 50s and while he did everything that I would expect a CTO to do - manage vendor relationships, deal with pre-sales

My last CTO of a 70 person company was in his 50s and while he did everything that I would expect a CTO to do - manage vendor relationships, deal with pre-sales when trying to get new customers (B2B), and define a vision, there were a number of times he would throw together a quick non production ready piece of code in Python or C# to prove out a concept and share it with me in Dropbox to make it production ready. I greatly appreciated it. That was part of his role with strategy. He understood technology well, played with Docker on the weekend and analyzed data using Athena (serverless AWS Apache Presto). But I knew when I spoke to him about a proposal, I needed to start off speaking non technical and talk about business value and business impact (when I got to technical he would say he “doesn’t have time to listen that shit” - we had a very good working relationship and we didn’t waste time with niceties when we were trying to get a point across to each other. When he had time though, we would need out. On the other hand, the CTO I had before that hadn’t been hands on technical at all for over a decade. When I spoke to him, I spoke only in terms of the business value and the holy Trinity (on time, on budget, meets requirements). In both cases, they hired me so they wouldn’t have to deal with those details and it was my responsibility to explain trade offs.