I'm the CTO now

🧨 Read the full original rant from Miserably Employed:

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Let me tell you a little story about unintentional leadership in tech.

Everyone quit.
The designers. The PMs. The guy who only ever talked about his standing desk.

So now… I’m the CTO.

Not because I earned it. Not because I wanted it.
But because I was too tired to leave.
What Leadership Actually Looks Like

Let me paint a picture for you:

• The CEO is still slinging “quick ideas” like pancakes at a bad diner.

• The investors want “roadmap clarity,” even though we’re actively sinking.

• The interns? Logging into Figma every morning like it means something.

The app is duct-taped together with half-dead microservices and a Redis instance that’s been sending me weird alerts since 2021. No one’s fixed billing in months. Someone set the deploy password to “12345” and then left the company.

I deploy on Fridays. Because nothing matters.
Climbing the Corporate Ladder (From Below)

I didn’t climb to the top.
I clawed my way through the smoking wreckage of a startup with a half-finished deployment script in one hand and a Slack notification in the other.

I’ve inherited a haunted codebase.
A backlog that’s a cry for help.
A wiki that hasn’t been updated since launch day.

I answer customer support tickets.
I merge PRs I don’t understand.
I manage AI interns who hallucinate half their reports.

But I’m here. I’m still showing up. And I guess that makes me “leadership” now.
Burnout as a Business Model

Call it burnout. Call it commitment. Call it unpaid therapy.

Whatever this is, it’s not “the dream.”

I’m not a visionary. I’m not agile. I’m not optimizing anything.

I’m just the last developer standing—and apparently, that means I’m in charge.
TL;DR

Startups fail.
People leave.
The only thing that stays is the broken code and whoever’s too exhausted to run.

And sometimes, that person becomes the CTO.

Welcome to the worst promotion of your life.

Comments

[sahra 💫]

'The CEO is still slinging “quick ideas” like pancakes at a bad diner.' Felt this line a lot. Hang in there. On the bright side, you can add the title of 'CTO' to your LinkedIn and your portfolio now😅.

[Rami James]

Honestly, I'd rather not be a CTO at all.

[Michael Liang]

Nice post