Re:A CTO should be technical
by kelnos on Monday September 26, 2022 @09:36PM
(#32990755)
> 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!
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!