Yes. This. I agree with you and the parent comment. I was "CTO" of my very small startup with < 10 people and 3 total engineers. I was extremely technical and

Yes. This. I agree with you and the parent comment. I was "CTO" of my very small startup with < 10 people and 3 total engineers. I was extremely technical and hands-on in that role. I've worked at a mid-sized business that didn't even have a CTO, despite having 4 FTE software engineers and a network infrastructure team. I now work for a globally distributed Fortune 500 company with nearly 100,000 employees working on hundreds of technical projects using all sorts of tech stacks and code from Embedded C to serverless SaaS offerings. The notion that my CTO should be able to "jump into the code, start grabbing JIRA tickets on a moment's notice, or throw together a new feature when a deadline is looming" is absurd. It might be nice to have a CTO that's been in that role at some point, but no way should I expect them to be able to tomorrow.