What nobody tells you about being a CTO
July 10, 2025
I've been playing a CTO role for close to 5 Years now. Everyone thinks becoming a CTO means you get to play with the coolest tech, make big architecture decisions, and finally escape those annoying business meetings. Here's what actually happens when you become a CTO.
You Stop writing Code (and that's not the actual problem)
You go from shipping features to making PowerPoint slides, however still the real problem isn't missing code. It's missing the immediate feedback loop. When you write code, you know within minutes if it works. When you make strategic decisions, you wait months to see if you screwed up.
Your job description becomes "everything else"
Sales team needs technical answers for a client? CTO problem. Product team wants to know if a feature is feasible? CTO problem. HR wants to hire developers but doesn't know what questions to ask? CTO problem. You become the human bridge between technical reality and business fantasy. Some days you're a translator, some days you're a therapist and some days you're a fortune teller. :-P
The Hardest Part is saying NO
The hardest part of being a CTO is saying no to your own team. When your best developer wants to rewrite the entire system in the latest framework, you have to say no. When the product team wants to add "just one small feature" that will require three months of technical work, you have to say no. When customers wants to know why simple changes take so long, you have to explain complexity without sounding like you're making excuses. You become the voice of technical reality in a world that prefers technical optimism.
Your technical opinions matter less than your political skills
You will learn that the best technical solution doesn't necessarily always win. The solution backed by the right stakeholders wins. You'll spend more time building consensus than building software. Your revolutionary architecture idea will not see the light of day unless you can sell it to three different departments.
Your success metric changes completely
As a developer, success was shipping features that work. As a CTO, success is shipping features that work, on time, within budget and without breaking anything else, while building team capability for the future.Your metrics become:
How fast can we hire and onboard new developers?
How quickly can we recover from production issues?
How much technical context is trapped in individual people's heads?
How confident is the business in our technical estimates?
Still, why should the CTO stay?
After going through all this, maybe being a great hands-on coder might seem like the best gig, but when you’re just cranking out code as an individual contributor, your impact is limited to one product. As a CTO, though, you get to lay the groundwork for future products that don’t even exist yet. It’s not just about building stuff, its also about proving that conventional wisdom is often conventional nonsense and every successful technical decision is a small victory against the way things have always been done.
The world needs more people who can see what's actually possible, not what's obviously possible.
