Thread by @HeyChelseaTroy

I realize this take is white hot (I anonymized the OP to minimize my blast zone), but if this is you, the vast majority of the time, you probably shouldn't have gone CEO.

Lemme explain why (and it's possible the OP is NOT one of the people I'm talking about).

When you're an eng-gone-CEO who feels this way, a lot of things have happened to you.

1. You probably got rewarded for being good at coding by being promoted out of it. Then you were in a job you were LESS good at. This doesn't feel great.

2. Turns out CEO isn't the same as monarch or president-for-a-day at most companies. It's a lot of delegating decisions you'd like to make yourself, and when you fail to do the delegating step it tends to blow up in your face.

Both these things suck and as a result...

For these people, it takes IMMENSE willpower to NOT hop back into code.

Most of the people I've seen in this position, real talk, don't have that willpower.

Which is a shame because when they hop back into the code, here's what happens.

First of all, they never pick that one bug no one wants to touch and apply their experience and tenacity to making all our lives easier.

They usually pick some giant-ass pet refactor of theirs.

Then, one of two things happens.

1. (most common) the refactor gets halfway done and/or they get stuck. Why? Because they're out of practice and decided that what they needed to do was come in here and take on one of the hardest engineering challenges there is...WITHOUT BUY-IN.

Now, it's some poor eng's job...

...to remove themselves from the priority ticket they SHOULD be doing and fix a poorly-executed, half-done science experiment because someone way up the power gradient wanted to have some fun.

2. LESS commonly, the CEO succeeds at getting the code working with the change in place.

However, they still never established buy-in or transferred context. So they set shared context on fire directly in front of the professional software engineers who need it to do their jobs.

And then they want praise for this.

If you want to trade jobs with your engineers this badly, either:

1. Find a side project, work on that AFTER you've done a good job being CEO, DO NOT F**K WITH IT on work hours, do not try to use it for cool points with your team

OR

2. Step down. Get hired as an eng ELSEWHERE (you can't undo this power gradient). Find a therapist to address the issues you have with the idea of abdicating the aforementioned power gradient.

Spend your work days doing the thing you're good at and want to do.