Man, if I'm trying to decide which company to work for, and I see a blog post from its CTO crowing …

> That's something you're willing to share out loud? Your company's technical process (which you're fully in control of, Mr. CTO) is so cumbersome that it seriously hinders your ability to execute This is exactly what someone who can't be easily unseated should be doing at a company - demonstrate to middle management that the process they've constructed is whack and take away excuses for not delivering. CEO or someone else on the founding team should be doing that to sales, marketing, etc as well

> regularly checking in code on Saturdays and Sundays If you’re working on insurance SaaS, I agree. If you’re building hard tech, I’d disagree entirely.

Frankly if you’re a CTO you aren’t incentivized by a salary. It makes sense in this case no different than you’d code on the weekends for your side hustle. It only doesn’t make sense when this jackass thinks the salaried engineer needs this “grit”. C-levels aren’t supposed to be “model employees”. The incentive structure is wildly weighted in their favor. Instead you should ask them to understand the difference, which is asking a lot of these sociopaths, but I digress.

I code as a founder/CTO on weekends, I don't expect weekend work done by anyone else and most people rarely check in if ever on weekends. The job profile of founder-CTO has not a lot of overlap with that of an individual contributor to be leading by example, the overlap is quite narrow even for senior engineering leadership. Until recently[3] leaders with prior coding skills were always discouraged from code contributions and focus on management exclusively, for all the reasons some of them you describe. -- I usually say that I am a part-time coder, not a professional one, and caution not to look at what I do as a benchmark or signal. Vast majority of the code I write are DevEx or QoL for internal teams[4], or refactor tech debt that no one has time to deal with. Even mid-stage startups may not be large enough to invest in dedicated teams for this type of work. Occasionally I have writte…

> I don’t particularly enjoy building orgs and figuring out people stuff. Engineering management involves navigating interpersonal dynamics, performance reviews, and organizational design. These are crucial functions, but they’re not where my strengths lie. This bit got me. It's a direct quote from the linked post for those who haven't read it

Regarding culture: Complete nonsense. The free market will tell him if he can do this or not. If he can get valid candidates pushing this culture and it’s legal, why shouldn’t he? You, anyone interviewing there or anyone working at their company presumably doesn’t have to work there. Most countries don’t have slavery for tech jobs! No doubt he will lose many candidates with this culture (you and I included) but maybe that’s a strategy? Maybe he still gets plenty of candidates that are good and the culture he wants.

> Your job at the top is, more than anything else, pushing down a healthy culture. The CTOs role leading the tech folk to support business goals, which culture a part of. The healthy part is a subjective thing.

That’s the point — I and others would have the opposite reaction, it’s self selecting, so it’s doing its job. I didn’t even read the article because I thought “boring, nothing special about a CTO who codes, we all do.”