Bit of a different take - I'm a programmer, but I've held the title CTO for the last 8 years. As a CTO, I've been routinely asked by non-technical peers and PR

Bit of a different take - I'm a programmer, but I've held the title CTO for the last 8 years. As a CTO, I've been routinely asked by non-technical peers and PR departments to represent the company more. Sometimes citing obscure reasons such as attracting technical talent - when we never had an issue with that. So far, I've largely resisted it by reasoning that it's not the most valuable thing I could be doing. As soon as I asked folks about concrete goals, KPIs, and business value, the arguments fell apart. If someone's job is to "do marketing", especially if they're inexperienced and/or have a small budget, they'll look to what they see other companies do and try to delegate it as much as they can. Even for marketing people, conference talks and blogging rarely have that much proven business value compared to other things they could be doing, in my experience. For programmers, that's all the more true. Even now that I went into consulting, I don't think hopping conferences and writing blog posts is gonna pay off more than other things I could be doing. I enjoy discussion (like here on HN), but something in me is averse to generating more noise - which most of my thoughts probably are. I'd rather build a few deeper relationships than an order of magnitude more shallow ones.