Unfortunately this meme that CTO and other members of executive team only supposed to be doing "thought leadership" is really pervasive now

The backlash is really telling of how bad things have gotten when a Chief Technology Officer coding in a software startup is disqualifying.

Maybe Staff Engineer would be a better title here. He doesn't seem to be doing much in the way of ya know, managing or running things.

I don't think this is a really convincing argument: There are plenty of leaders who haven't "done the job" in decades, and we don't question that. It's incredibly common in professional sports, for example.

Mike McCarthy hasn't played a down of American football in 40 years, and never played at a very high level. But we don't question his ability to get others to perform complex motions.

This is not really a good analogy. Tech is different.

I am not saying you should sit down and write code. But in IT you know the difference between a tech lead who knows technology, who knows what works, for what reason. And the one that just demands results but knows nothing about the details of the technology. Has never gotten his hands on it.

> This is not really a good analogy. Tech is different.

Why? Seriously: Give me a convincing reason why tech is different from every other field, where this happens regularly.

> I am not saying you should sit down and write code.

But that's the whole premise of this conversation. It's entirely possible to understand something deeply without doing the thing yourself.

It's entirely possible for a CTO to deeply understand technology without writing any code themselves, opening up a terminal, tinkering with anything, or even what individual contributors are doing day-to-day. I would actually say that's the hallmark of a good CTO.

Because one is an intellectual activity, the other is not. You cannot expect the 60+ year old coach to run and train with the team members. But you can as a CTO try out technology, open the terminal, run a docker container to see the technology. Otherwise you are too far away from the things you try to orchestrate. Here the analogy of a master chef comes to mind. She doesn't have to work with her sous-chefs, but it helps to be able to still master the knife, make sushi or make a Crème brûlée, or even an omelette. All while mostly focusing on the big picture.