I don't think a well-managed software company should keep everyone 100% allocated to their primary function. It's too brittle and it leaves too many potentially

I don't think a well-managed software company should keep everyone 100% allocated to their primary function. It's too brittle and it leaves too many potentially game-changing ideas unexplored. I would be happy to work at a company where everyone spends 10% of their time on skunkworks-type projects, or cross-training in a totally different part of the organization, and that would include the CTO sometimes writing code. (Obviously little startups don't have this luxury, but in those cases the CTO is justified in coding anyway.)