As a CTO, once my engineering team grew large enough, I found it extremely difficult to spend any time writing code. And all the prevailing wisdom backed that up as a good thing:

  • Writing code is low-leverage for the CTO
  • You shouldn’t become a bottleneck
  • Writing code as a CTO signals low trust in the team, bad delegation, etc
  • Every hour coding is an hour not spent removing organizational bottlenecks

All of the above is true, but I would never again follow that wisdom as a CTO. The thing that writing code gives me (along with reading AI/ML research papers each week and discussing them with actual humans and not just Claude), is joy. It brings me energy, and a love for what can be a very difficult job. It makes the role sustainable, which is necessary for longevity.

So the advice I give now, to CTOs struggling with this is: don’t write code like a jerk - don’t pick the most juicy ticket to work on, don’t increase the PR burden of your team too much, definitely don’t become a bottleneck. But do block off 2 hours in your calendar every week, label it “deep strategy work” if you need to, and hack away.

Find the joy! 💫