One job, many roles: The different skills needed to be a successful CTO
This is one thing I&#x27;ve seen crushing startups - not changing CTO&#x27;s after traction, but keeping the founder that wrote the MVP as a CTO. It isn&#x27;t always a bad thing, there are a lot of hackers that fill the role, but when it&#x27;s not even considered because &quot;he&#x27;s a founder so he needs to remain CTO&quot; vs &quot;he&#x27;s got the CTO skills&quot; it is an alarming sign.<p>I&#x27;ve worked in a startup (about 30 ppl)  where the CTO was one of the founders and he was doing nothing but holding the company back with his decisions and his 0-architecture-spaghetti code. My first day, when I saw all the trash going on I thought &quot;ok I can&#x27;t really quit my first day so they&#x27;ll have to fire me&quot;.<p>Decided to take ownership and start treating him like any other team member, reviewing and declining his merge requests (those weren&#x27;t use before I came, they just commited all over the place), refactoring, planning ahead because otherwise we would have never delivered on time - his own technical debt extended feature delivery time by weeks. He was aware and admitted his &quot;lack of skills&quot;, but wasn&#x27;t aware of how much he actually lacked.<p>We managed to take it out the gutter and polish it up a lot in the next two years, but after all the mess and his obvious lack of knowledge, he still remained the CTO, long  after I left. So please, if you are a CTO of a startup and are aware you lack skills, don&#x27;t try to drive technical decisions and actively look for a replacement. Your decisions can create friction for whole company and burn it to ground right before it takes off. And if you work under a CTO like that, just take the damn responsibility and challenge dumb stuff or quit, or you might fall into the sloppy spaghetti.