I'm officially CTC.

Chief Technical Clown 🤡

How do I know? I've yet to write a single line of productive code today. I've spent the day purely as an administrative cog: writing emails, giving data to consultants, supporting juniors, and cleaning up the absolute hellscape that is also known as our Jira project.

I've become exactly what I hate.

Fun times!

How long are you going to last?

So you became CTO and expected a C-level position to involve writing of actual code?!

Guys, we lost @fullstackclown to the C-level...
May he rest in peace, he was such a good soul.
⚰️

@Oktokolo lol, I've seen this comment and thought "yeah, that's one of those stupid..." and then saw it's my good old friend Okto.

@kiki So would you expect the c level to write code? Did you see any C level write code?

My guess: Someone stole your sweet roll!

@Oktokolo I’m a C, and I write code

@kiki An exception occured!

@kiki @Oktokolo

Kind of depends on company size though...

For a while our CTO wrote more code than any other developer, and as "Head of Engineering" I was second in command AND second in commits.

That was in the period where we expanded from 2 -> 20 developers.

I eventually said "no thanks" to a management position, crawled back to bitching about stuff from the comforts of my coding cave.

Now we're at ~180 devs, we stole all kinds of overpaid C-level lizardpeople from famous unicorn scale-ups, and when I explain to the current CTO: "Our CI/CD had some problems yesterday", he responds with "WHAT IS VALUE PROPOSITION OF THIS? HOW DOES CI/CD DELIVER VALUE TO OUR STAKEHOLDERS?!?!?1?"

CTO of a dozen people is about pulling the cart.

CTO of a hundred people is about pulling off the politics.

@kiki This is the way.

@bittersweet Well said, I am currently pulling a very heavy cart

@bittersweet Yeah, i know that "we are just a bunch of friends hoping to make something which is eventually swallowed by Google and we can print fancy C roles on our business cards because why not" enthusiasm. Been there too.

But C*O role names indicate specialized management top-level roles. If you are doing mostly non-management stuff, your role isn't a specialized management one.

You could call the selfemployed hotdog stand operator a CEO, COO, CFO, CMO and CIO just because he is at the top of the decision making hierachy of a company (that hotdog stand). But it would be a total misuse of that terms as management just isn't what a selfemployed hotdog stand operator mostly does.

@Oktokolo Yeah but its not specialized... its literally what anyone else would do at any other company in the same role, just ordering everyone around. I think the real reason the position itself is attractive is for the insights and experience it hints at. i.e "where did you fuck up? where did things go well? what did you learn?" etc etc etc