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CTO is "management" by definition. Do you mean to say most companies have non-technical CTOs who treat engineering as commodity? That might have been the case

CTO is "management" by definition. Do you mean to say most companies have non-technical CTOs who treat engineering as commodity? That might have been the case with CIO/CTOs coming from pre-2010s era where they indeed were maintaining landscapes built from commodities or vendor solutions (i.e. on-prem server racks, CRM and ERP systems, networks, end user devices, subscriptions to cloud applications etc - some still do). Modern CTOs managing complex tech landscapes that were partially built in-house are rarely like that. In my experience any CTO ties engineering, be it commodity or not, to value which is highlighted in the article, or get replaced. That's a key part of their role, if not 80% of it. If you think your CTO is underselling engineering contributions, he's either not doing a good job of making that value visible, or you overestimate these contributions.

pc86 2y ago
C-suite executives are "management" only insofar as they are someone's direct supervisor and that person wants to make them happy. And if you've got brand new managers with single-digit years of experience reporting to them, sure they probably do a fair bit of people management. But that's not the norm. If you're at a sufficiently large company you'll have Presidents reporting to the C-suite, 3-5+ levels of VPs below that, 1-3 levels of directors, and a level or two of individual contributors. So you're approaching double-digit numbers of people between C suite and the people who should theoretically actually need day-to-day performance management. There is not a competent Executive Vice President or Division President in the world that needs to be managed by their boss.