CTO positions are much more about technology vision (e.g. choosing frameworks/technologies that can last + serve your needs today and tomorrow) and hiring/retaining talent. Everything else is gravy.
It depends on the companies. For some, CTO is merely a business title and an outward facing person, but the (S)VP of Engineering / Director of Engineering is more politically powerful since he/she leads the engineering division, and does not report to CTO at all.
Many of the Fortune 500 companies have both CIO and CTO, and they are not necessarily peer to each other. In the recent years a bunch of new titles like big data chief, digital media /innovation chief, process and technology chief, etc which make the political scheme more confusing and toxic. Many of them end up reporting to CEO directly. There's also EVP rank, so go figure...
Is the choosing frameworks and technologies really a thing that CTOs do? That seems like more of a tech lead/architect job to choose the right tool for the job. I could see the cto pushing back on those choices from time to time if something is being drastically over engineered but declaring what technology is being used seems like a job far below a cto.
In a word, no. But in startup-land, where the total number of people on the engineering team is, say, less than 10, chances are good that the CTO will also play a lead engineer and/or architect sort of role, in which case they will play a part in designing the architecture, selecting frameworks, and so forth.
Why call the role a CTO then? If the role is closer to a tech lead or architect, just call them an architect.
This has always confused me in start up land. There will be a full c suite in a company of 10 people, despite that those c suite folks day to day would look nothing like a corporate position.
Just call it what it is instead of inflating titles.
> Why call the role a CTO then? If the role is closer to a tech lead or architect, just call them an architect.
I agree! How many times I got job offers that read basically: "CTO/sole developer". That's inflated and meaningless, like being one of 100 Senior VPs in a bank.
What do you call the person running the company of 10 people? I guess "team lead" would be a non inflated title, or just "manager"? It would be pretty strange to have to explain that title to anyone outside of the company though
I think there is some semantics here. A CTO at all levels needs to have an understand of their (1) current stack of technologies and understand how it improves the business (2) a future stack of technologies and how it may improve the business in the future.
Specifically this could mean as minuscule as "We're using RoR for our website" to more broad like "We need to have sensors in every food package we ship to manage our supply chain and we use IBM IoT platform to do this". The point is have a defined vision with subsequent technology choice behind it. Whether or not you have a Lt that helps drive those decisions is moot.
This article seems focused towards startups, and the chances of most startups even having a tech lead/architect are pretty slim. So yes. Many CTOs do pretty much 'everything' for quite a while until the funding is there to build a real team.
CTO positions are much more about technology vision (e.g. choosing frameworks/technologies that can last + serve your needs today and tomorrow) and hiring/retaining talent. Everything else is gravy.