If the company initiative is to be transparent then sure you can be. However that is the vast minority of companies. Though people on HN may have a skew to thinking the opposite.
The comment I replied to has very startup company silicon valley skew to it naive of the majority of the world. Very few of us are in any position to determine or change the political/cultural/driving forces of a company we have to work at. Usually the best you can do is adapt to whatever is already there and try to make the best of it.
CTO is not a powerful position at most companies.
This I do agree with. Many CTOs don't actually have the entire engineering organization under them in the reporting chain (at a reasonably-mature company; not talking about a startup where the CTO is often one of the co-founders and runs engineering), so they have no real power to get other people to do what they think should be done.
At best they have an "Office of the CTO", or perhaps run the company's software architecture group (if the company even has one), and then they just have a tiny army of people who try their hardest to convince other teams to do things that aren't in their roadmap and would mean pissing off their bosses if they took them on. Not fun!
A lot can be achieved by aligning themselves with successful projects and crapping on others at the start or just at the cusp point of success or failure.
I would argue the opposite: transparency is one of the biggest part of your job. You're not in a leadership position, and it's your choice: do you want an opaque company where politics drive individual success? Or do you want a transparent company where employees respect their leaders and where the best insight wins?