One of my friends is a CTO. In some ways he was my first boss too (it depends what counts as a real job). He actually moved from programming to management, because for him writing code wasn't something he was passionate about and he felt his skills were more appropriate in managing tech (I'm sure the money helps too). But though I haven't worked for his present outfit, I'm sure I'd find that where it seemed appropriate he's still writing toy SML or Python code that shows what he wants, knowing the finished system will likely be written in another language entirely. Not doing that seems as crazy as if you had an exec with good German, addressing your German-speaking team, via a translator just because that's how their predecessors who didn't speak German did it. He can write code and that's the natural way to express how the code should work.