4 ms·
Why CTOs shouldn’t write code at work
- calhoun137 14y agoThis article gets a little bizarre at the end, until you realize she forgot to mention that she is no longer CTO.
- plinkplonk 14y agoDoes it even make any sense for a good engineer to remain an engineer even in startups? It seems that power (and stock and money) gravitates to executives who don't code. Why not be a CTO who 'doesn't code at work' anymore? Why spend your time working late nights and burning out on fulfilling someone else's dream? (there are good answers to these questions, especially if you think in terms of economics, but it behooves a good engineer to think about them and find her own answer) From the article, after the author stopped coding, "I still was technical. I often wrote code on the weekends. Although the type of work I did is what I call tinkering. I would want to know about a new language or technology, and so I would build little sample applications (typically analogous to a slightly more advanced “Hello, World!”) – just to learn enough to form an opinion. And I read a lot of articles, source code, and documentation on things that struck my fancy." sounds like a plan. I particularly like the "I was still technical" sentence.
- kate_mats 14y agoThanks for the comment plinkplonk - I think it is super important to be technical. In reading some of the other comments on the post, I really think the decision was based on priority and the fact that in the free 1-2 hours I had working on adding code to our production systems actually didn't add enough value.