That’s not a role that I’d normally associate with “Chief” anything (which, by definition, means direct reports). More like Principal Engineer, or Architect.

In smaller companies, this is probably fairly normal, but you can’t maintain this, as the company grows.

I had a similar path, in my career. I originally started as a regular engineer, in a two-person team, and eventually ended up managing a small team of up to ten engineers.

Towards the end, I couldn’t write any code (for the company), at all. I still needed to code, but did so, for volunteer/open-source stuff. I think it made me a better technical leader (I had an employment contract without a clause that interfered with outside coding).

I remember wanting to take an iOS training course, but the company wouldn’t support it, so I took vacation, and went on my own dime. I never regretted it, but it was discouraging.

The happy medium that the CTO did at the company where I worked where I was the architect guiding the technical direction, he would do non production level experimental coding as research - integrations with third party APIs, see if an AWS service was suitable - to take some of the load off of me hand the code over to me and I cleaned it up and made it production ready and championed it to the rest of the teams.

He still helped accelerate efforts, got his coding fix when he had time, wasn’t in the critical path of any work, and he made the entire org better.

Isn't this the fun part?

That’s not a CTO, that’s a dev.

I was about to ask how someone in the C suite has time to code at all, ever, but here we are.