The CTO's role encompasses more than ever before, especially becoming more strategic and customer-facing. Should a CTO still program/code? Why or why not?
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It all depends of the company size. In a newborn startup coding is almost a must, but as the strategic challenges grow she must learn hot to delegate and let it go. Accept that the required skills are changing to leadership (the Leadership Pipeline is a great book on this). For large companies, I don't think it makes sense, but it's good to have the geek king of CTO that at least is coding as hobby. I once asked a similar question to Uncle Bob on Twitter. His answer was to always keep coding in order to keep up t date with new technologies.
If it's a startup, and/or the team size is in single digit, then yes, he/she should be putting some time working in programming the system. But once the number of people in the tech team increases to a double-digit, then he can reduce the programming time.
In larger teams, CTO need not put the time in programming, but he/she should put the time in developing/understanding Infrastructure and system architecture of the product/service. And it should more on strategic decision making.
No day to day but a deep technical understanding is definitely valuable. Hard to really communicate about a technical subject of the depth of knowledge is skin deep.
I’d say this depends on the size of the organization. Startups- yes for sure otherwise cto is a superfluous resource. Larger established companies, probably not as there are so many other things to do, that you would be a bottleneck and stress yourself out.
Cto should be someone that coded at some point, but I find it’s not necessary to code as part of my role.
Continuous learning is important for all leaders. I believe if you don't have a general technical understanding of the subject matter you can't be the best leader possible. I've met leaders who actually bragged they didn't have any technical knowledge, and felt they were 100% effective. In my opinion they managed the budget and the HR processes well, but their teams were not as successful as they could be due to the non-technical leader committed to timelines and projects that were obviously understaffed and/or technically not feasible within the budget.