> I currently manage no direct reports and ship a lot of code.
This is a wildly different status than almost all other people with this title.
I’m glad this person still likes coding, and they seem to be great at it, but this role doesn’t match up to the title. This doesn’t really matter until he wants to switch jobs and realizes near zero CTO positions outside of this one company will require few meetings and zero management. He’d have to change title to principal engineer or something but an article titled “Why I code as a Principal Engineer” doesn’t quite grab attention the same way.
It seems possible that most CTOs are in tiny startups, don't have reports and we don't know about them because, having no reports, they don't get a lot of visibility compared to someone at the top of a 10,000 person org chart.
But the article framing is still odd. If the CTO has no reports who is going to do the coding other than the CTO? The reason the CTO is coding is because, being CTO, they want technical things to happen. He can't farm it off to his reports because they don't exist. Case closed. The real question is why doesn't he feel hiring some people to code is a good idea. 1 highly capable report could probably +30%, 40% his productivity.
With no directs, even “principal” would be a stretch in any company of note. If he spends that much time “coding”, that barely qualifies as a “senior” at large tech companies.
Most of those engineers, outside of ones who have extremely specialized knowledge or skills, are essentially managing others still just without a direct reporting chain.
The commit log for most of these high-level engineers is extremely sparse. They're spending most of their time writing documents or influencing orgs, not writing code.
Yes. I was responding to the sentence "With no directs, even “principal” would be a stretch in any company of note." which talked about direct reports.
Let me clarify. I know there are principals with no directs. I’m more calling out that the “scope” of a principal is a high bar at Big Tech and if he is spending all of his time coding at a startup, I doubt that he is working at the level of a principal at BigTech.
My own anecdote is that the level of work I was doing as an “architect” at a 60 person startup where I was the second technical hire when the new CTO was hired to bring tech leadership in house from a third party consulting company mapped to a mid level L5 consultant at AWS ProServe (to be fair I only had two and a half years of AWS experience at the time I was hired by AWS) and now while I’m a “Staff consultant” at a third party AWS consulting firm with around 1000 people, looking at the leveling guidelines and expectations at my current company, AWS and GCP, it maps to a “senior”
It's definitely not super uncommon where I'm at. CTOs, especially those that founded companies and are more technical doers than managers, that end up having responsibility for architecture and technical matters (tech lead deluxe), but no people (due to lack of people management and leadership skills/or desire for that kind of job - sometimes also product management skills at larger organizations).
Not much is worse than working somewhere that a higher up is squatting a job title that they don't want to do. It just causes a dysfunctional lord of the flies situation where lower people fight for the reigns to get what they want.
CTO is usually the exec responsible for the entire tech org. The CTO reports to the CEO, and the top managers and maybe a few ICs in the tech org report to the CTO.
I was CTO of a <20 person startup. I recruited the entire tech team, collaborated with the CEO to build the product backlog and spec things out, presented to investors, but also had at least 50% time to code. Not all “CTO” roles are the same. At a small company they better be hands on.
I think a founder/early gets away with "CTO" on their resume, esp. if they're the only person in the org with the role (ie: it's a PM-style CTO, and there isn't a VP/PM; or: it's a VP/E-style CTO, and there isn't a VP/E). But outside that circumstance, given the choice, I'd rather have the VP/PM or VP/E role than "CTO".
(As we get deeper into these threads I am further out on a limb.)
Yes, I was one of the first hires. My role was closer to VP/E and "CTO" was mostly vanity, a reward for being early and getting a new company through the first couple years.
You're saying "usually" about something that has definitely not been a norm in my career. It seems like there's really only two ways to interpret that arrangement: either the CTO is in fact the EVP/E (fair enough! lots of CTOs are other exec roles with a funny hat), or the CTO has a single top-level manager report, in which case what really happened is that the org hired a pro to run engineering and put the "CTO" out to pasture.
Dotted line reporting is very different. In these instances the VP/E is usually directly interfacing with other executives as the CTO's peer. This is even more true when the budget is managed by the VP/E and the CTO is more customer/sales facing.
I've been at several companies that have a CTO and a Director of Engineering. The CTO sets the strategy, and the Director of Engineering handles the execution. In theory the Director "reports" to the CTO (I.e. is under in the org chart), but not necessarily. Sometimes the Director reports to the CEO, and/or takes a more collaborative role with the CTO.
This does not apply at my current company, where the CTO has their title as an artifact of how the founding team was structured, but if I was founder/early at a company, progressed to a senior role, and then was told that I should take a role where I "set engineering strategy", I would immediately conclude that I was being managed out. "Strategy", in particular, is the kiss of death.
Both in my own personal direct experience and in 15 years of consulting, primarily for tech startups, the modal CTO I encountered had in reality a product manager role with a special title that was helpful in important pre-sales meetings --- and they did not tend to be the de facto VP/PM.
I think CTO as "other, better-defined kind of exec, but with a funny hat" is a perfectly cromulent model. I think CTO as "PM that customers feel flattered to talk to" is another perfectly cromulent model. To me, "CTO" is almost an honorific, or like a title of nobility.
Exactly. Most CTO's have tens if not hundreds of direct reports that rely on them regularly. Which is why their time must be used to support them leaving absolutely 0 time to do PR code contributions on the side (unless you work weekends).
> Cybertruck turned out to be Tesla’s first real commercial flop.
It's not an uncommon feeling but the cybertruck is just a flop on so many levels. To me, the most striking way is visually. It's like what an 11 year-old dreams about for a truck. To me, if I want a truck EV at this point I'd pick a Rivian any day. At least those are visually appealing, where the cybertruck exudes "LOOK AT ME I'M A BIG MEME LOL".
It really does just look like no one with any industrial design experience had any involvement in the thing. Truck drawn by a child really is the only way to describe it.
I’m nearly certain that if I had any of my notebooks from when I was a child age 5-10 or so, there would be at least one vehicle I drew that is exactly like the Tesla truck. Though my version probably had rocket launchers and machine guns on it.
This was awesome, mainly because the paths I could choose were real things I might do. So relevant to my life. And I’m not taking the stats too seriously as it seems so many others are, which is almost comical given the topic. Thank you!
One thing I really like using them for is refactoring/reorganizing. The tedious nature of renaming, renaming all implementations, moving files around, creating/deleting folders, updating imports exports, all melts away when you task an agent with it. Of course this assumes they are good enough to do them with quality, which is like 75% of the time for me so far.
I've found that it can be hard or expensive for the agent to do "big but simple" refactors in some cases. For example, I recently tasked one with updating all our old APIs to accept a more strongly typed user ID instead of a generic UUID type. No business logic changes, just change the type of the parameter, and in some cases be wary of misleading argument names by lazy devs copy pasting code. This ended up burning through the entire context window of GPT-5-codex and cost the most $ of anything I've ever tasked an agent with.
The way I do this is I task the agent with writing a script which in turn does the updates. I can inspect that script, and I can run it on a subset of files/folders, and I can git revert changes if something went wrong and ask the agent to fix the script or fine-tune it myself. And I don't burn through tokens :)
Also, another important factor (as in everything) is to do things in many small steps, instead of giving one big complicated prompt.
Blunt text replacement so far. There are third-party VSCode MCP and LSM MCP servers out there that DO expose those higher-level operations. I haven't tried them out myself -- but it's on my list because I expect they'd cut down on token use and improve latency substantially. I expect Anthropic to eventually build that into their IDE integration.
Can someone explain to me how a public company can go private and there’s no fear of outcry from the shareholders in said company? Like companies do all these evil things to please shareholders but wouldn’t many shareholders of a public company be against the transition back to private?
They generally pay a premium to the stock price before the transaction is announced, which means shareholders get more than the market value of their investment, which they can immediately roll into other investments. Usually people don't mind getting paid extra.
They are also shielded from any losses. The stock price is meant to reflect the market consensus on the net present value of all time-discounted future cashflows. If you feel the stock will certainly gain in the future, you should purchase the stock now and if enough people believe that, the stock now will reflect the future gain.
It would be nice to have more diversity in models of ownership and profit-sharing widely used in the market. Like Meta's split between voting shares and non-voting shares which lets them keep control of the company but let shareholders participate in the economic gains. There could be other models, like what if any single person could only own X shares and voting shares were only allowed to be bought by/on behalf of individuals not companies. Maybe models of ownership where the executives don't have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit and instead have more latitude on how they choose to run it.
You could just eliminate the regulations on who can and cannot be an accredited investor. It's a bit paternalistic to tell people what they can and cannot spend their money on in the first place tbh
True. Average people are sophisticated enough to understand complex financial instruments designed to scam them by an army of lawyers and MBAs trained at the finest financial institutions and law schools.
How does having a net worth of $1M or an annual income of over $200K inure you to being scammed by complex financial instruments?
Also, we already let people engage in sports gambling (which is guaranteed to result in a net loss) and cryptocurrency speculation, (which is a zero sum game). I'd rather give people more options to invest in financial instruments that at least in theory have the potential to be positive sum, since we're not going to ban either of the other two any time soon.
Your examples of cryptocurrency and sports gambling are a perfect example of my criticism. There are virtually no people that are sophisticated enough to succeed in either of those activities as they are all based on pure speculation and luck. There is no actual asset in either of these cases. While some modern crypto coins might be back with actual assets, many crypto coins are backed by only speculation and no actual assets. Basically they’re scams.
Yes, that was my point. Both are scams, but both are very legal. It seems dumb to bar people from investing in real, productive assets (even complex ones that might have a poor rate of return relative to index funds) when we let them "invest" in things that are guaranteed losses on average.
I happen to be a shareholder in EA as part of a diversified portfolio. Not that my vote matters but I'll definitely be taking PE money. +20% in one day is nothing to sneeze at.
From the other comments about EA's games, it's not like EA is that special of a company. There's always going to be some other company (not necessarily an AAA-games maker) worth putting your capital in and end up doing as well as what the hypothetical EA could do if it were not taken private. (Obviously finding such market-outperformer isn't easy but by the same argument I'm not convinced that EA would be obviously that outperformer either.)
This is just your gambling addiction showing itself. There may not be any potential gains in value after the transaction. In fact, most take privates result in massive up front losses for the new owners.
And anyways, shareholders are paid a premium on today’s stock price (which theoretically reflects the current value of future profits, or at least the market’s view on it) in order to compensate for the exact loss you mention.
Exactly. There is usually a vote and then there is a premium price paid for the stock over market value.
It happened to a company I held stock in. Years later there was a litigation started with some shareholders contesting the vote process and the results.
With public companies more or less the only thing that shareholders can complain about in terms of the company being taken private is if the price is unfair (in which case they can sue). Otherwise the only thing that the entity buying needs is the consent of the board and a majority shareholder vote, whether by buying a controlling share themselves on the open market or by negotiating with them. Usually the private buyer offers a price higher than the current public market cap to incentivize the shareholders to vote for a sale.
(And yes, this means that in practice there is a compelled sale of some fraction of the stock at whatever price the majority agrees to)
Immediate 20-30% jump in stock price if shareholders approve and can reinvest anywhere else. With a huge one day gain. In some cases, preferred shareholders get even sweeter deals.
If you’re an executive or board member with a tons of shares you make millions and can retire immediately (or at least after the transition you agree to is complete.)
"Immediate 20-30% jump in stock price" is not wrong, but it is clearer to say that for the acquisition to succeed, usually the acquirer must pay a 20-30% premium.
20-30% premium even over the fictional mark-to-market stock price. If all that were to hit the open market at once at any time, the price would plummet. I really question whether acquisition ROI is positive except in rare cases on a first order basis. Eliminating future compensation, securing a propaganda emitter, etc I can see (though not quite sure what the story would be in this case).
Right, of course. My point is that the acquisition premium is actually higher than the nominal premium.
The share price is for the current share supply. If the supply increases, then the price goes down.
There is also a confounding effect in the cases where shares have actually flooded the market, where the confounder is whatever the reason for flooding is. But even if you magically forced a mass sale with no negative event causing it, the price would still plummet due to the supply flood.
If you're a shareholder, you can vote "no" to selling with your shares. Generally, selling a public company requires the majority of the shares to vote "yes" in order to force the minority shareholders to go along with the sale. Usually the share price being offered represents a substantial uplift over the current trading price of the shares (and thus the value of the company). If the transaction unfairly hurts the financial value for minority shareholders they can sue to block the transaction (which does happen).
If they don’t like it they can vote it down or make a higher bid. This is why almost all buyouts come with a premium. If they choose as a group not to sell then the deal doesn’t get done. They elect a board to get the best deal for them.
One thing is fiduciary duty to the shareholders, another is “pleasing the shareholders” as you describe it. Pleasing the shareholders is necessary only when displeasing them means they will sell the stock when there is no buyer. If there is a buyer, the current shareholders are less relevant — as long as management cannot be accused of not fulfilling their fiduciary duty to them.
Funny/sad story, my friend works for the government making maps for watersheds. Elon comes along and forces people to go back to office. She’d been remote since she was hired 3+ years ago. So suddenly she’s assigned to the closest gov office near her, which is an ICE OFFICE in SF, about an hour commute from where she lives (each way). She’s massively against the goings-on at ICE and asks for an alternate spot. She now has to commute 1:15 each way to an animal holding office in SFO. She is currently zooming into work each day from an office full of transient animals and no humans related to anything she does, all in the name of government efficiency. Needless to say, her work efficiency has diminished greatly.
This is why I stay at a company that’s 100% remote even though I’m sacrificing many thousands of dollars a year in additional income. I just can’t go back for so many reasons. But the most frustrating one in my opinion is exactly what you said, that all of this can be done remotely.
They made this for people with cognitive disabilities, but it also works great for older people. It just wouldn't work for me. I need Jira, Slack, and GitHub during work hours for example. But I don't want them during non-work hours. I realize I'm describing something actually doable in the interface now with focus modes and just holding myself accountable by deleting apps like Tiktok, but I do like the idea of having a way to enforce it.
> I need Jira, Slack, and GitHub during work hours for example.
So do I, but I certainly don't need them on my phone. For the longest time the only work app I had on my phone was some 2FA thing. Then asked them to either buy me a phone or a yubikey. I got a yubikey (and my phone complete free from anything work related).
I tried this for a bunch of work apps that require 2FA. They pushed back hard enough where I was threatened with getting written up. I relented and installed MS Authenticator on my personal phone.
I'm still bitter about the intrusion of work stuff on my personal phone.
I absolutely hate Microsoft authenticator. Why does it need its own app? Google Authenticator, Auth Apple Passwords, freaking Aegis, everything works with TOTP and piece of shit Microsoft has to go off and do its own thing like that nonsense Duo.
You can actually use an alternative authenticator app for Microsoft logins. I use Aegis on my phone for it.
They don't make it clear in the messaging during the sign-up flow, which just says Microsoft Authenticator everywhere. But when you proceed through the steps to get a TOTP code for Microsoft Authenticator, there's a step with a link to something like "I want to use an another authenticor app", which presents a QR code for any generic TOTP app.
I've done this as well. My employers setup guide was super long winded and tried hard to suggest MS Authenticator was the only one that would work without outright saying it.
However, I've gathered that this is a setting that is up to the organization so your YMMV. Since some employees work at secure sites without wifi/mobile connections they aren't able to turn off TOTP.
I realize it is amusing to even consider offloading OTP generation to a web browser extension however, if `$work` doesn’t want to provide you with the correct hardware (e.g. Yubikey, NitroKey, etc.) there are boundary-respecting alternatives
I don’t know if this would work for you, but I’m personally using 1Password on my laptop to generate 2FA codes. It worked even on Microsoft services, after clicking through lots of alternative settings, although some employers might disable that if they insist on push 2FA not just TOTP.
> It just wouldn't work for me. I need Jira, Slack, and GitHub during work hours for example. But I don't want them during non-work hours.
Not an iPhone, but my solution to this is LineageOS + microG, where I just disable push notifications when I'm not working, or enable them for just the few select apps if I am expecting some messages there. The price for this is that I don't always receive the social app message when it is sent, but that's fine by me.
Plain Android has work profiles that will allow the user to enable/disable a "work profile" at will. This is what I use because we have on-call duties and on most weeks I don't need to be available on my work accounts.
If your work-style is butt-in-seat for 8 hours having everything on your laptop probably works. For folks with a more meeting-heavy workload, having at least your work calendar/email/messenger on your phone is pretty hard to go without
Why are you on your phone during meetings and not paying attention to the meeting? We ban phones/laptops for the specific reason of people attending and not paying attention.
I like Assistive Access, but my biggest issue is that you have to click like 100 times to read any notification. No option to just be able to read a text from the home screen. I found it was even more friction (for my use) to unlock my phone constantly than the regular format.
This. The I feel the significant nerfing of important functionality in the Camera app (as an example) suggests assistive access isn't geared toward the general folk like myself.
YES. I love the examples here. The best one to me is the row background color transition on hover. It's painful, it feels like the UI is sluggish, when it reality it was someone going a little too hard on animation for no reason. Too often we think more animations = better.
This is a wildly different status than almost all other people with this title.
I’m glad this person still likes coding, and they seem to be great at it, but this role doesn’t match up to the title. This doesn’t really matter until he wants to switch jobs and realizes near zero CTO positions outside of this one company will require few meetings and zero management. He’d have to change title to principal engineer or something but an article titled “Why I code as a Principal Engineer” doesn’t quite grab attention the same way.
reply