Should I become a Fractional CTO?
Follow-up from a recent collab article in which Greg and I discussed how people can make the transition towards a Fractional CTO role.
A couple of weeks ago,
and I published an article1 in his newsletter, Engineering Leadership, in which we explored the paths that led us to become Fractional CTOs. The article came out after we had conducted a live event on the same topic.You can check the recordings here (you'll need to share your email address to gain access).
The event and the article have been well received, with people asking questions and commenting on their journey.
Today's article follows up on an issue many people tend to encounter when choosing specific career paths.
If the first post was deliberately instructional and practical, this one is a lot more philosophical. I firmly believe that both levels of reflection are required when addressing essential life choices.
Let's start with a confession: I never wanted to be a fractional CTO.
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Now, back to the article.
I never wanted to be a Fractional CTO
Before you think I've been forced to do my job by a gang of nasty dudes or that I'm on Fentanyl, keep reading.
When I say that I never wanted to be a Fractional CTO, I mean it quite literally: it has never been my goal, my aim, my inner desire to eventually become a Fractional CTO. That doesn't mean I dislike doing it, that I'm doing it against my will or that others should not do the same as I do.
The main reason I ended up doing a job that has been gaining popularity thanks to the catchy label is that I stopped caring about jobs and titles and shifted my focus towards the broader goal of living a life more aligned with my values and desires.
When I made that critical decision, I didn't do it with a role-oriented mindset but an exploratory mindset. I started with a question:
How can I deliver value to companies and individuals while retaining a high degree of flexibility and autonomy, and make a living while doing so?
Such an open-ended question made it harder for me to be associated with easily understood—and often dramatically misunderstood—labels. Putting together a meaningful LinkedIn headline and intro took longer than it used to when I worked a regular 9-to-5 job.
Ultimately, that didn't matter, as I was more interested in keeping options open at the time. That still holds true today.
So, when my long-time friend Michelangelo offered me the opportunity to join Volumio—a project I'm really excited about—as a part-time CTO, I gladly accepted. I picked the Fractional CTO label for the role, as that seemed to be what we like to call it today. I thought about it for about 500ms and focused instead on understanding the role and how best I could deliver value to the company within a limited time.
The fractional CTO role was a good match between the company's needs and my skills and experience. If, in a few months or years, the company becomes so successful that it requires a fully dedicated person in charge of the engineering team, I will evaluate that opportunity through the same lenses.
I will likely decline the offer if my driving motivation is still focused on flexibility and autonomy — and I don't see why that would not be the case.
I won't decline it because I am narrowly attached to the fractional role but because it would be incompatible with my core principles.
Conversely, a transition into a Board or Advisor role—if relevant for the company—would be more compatible with retaining flexibility and autonomy.
The bottom line is that I care less about the specifics of the job—as long as it's something where my expertise is relevant—and I care more about what lifestyle that job is more or less compatible with.
That's why I never wanted to be a Fractional CTO.
I always wanted more control over where I spent my time and attention.
Labels come and go
Do not tie your destiny to a label, no matter how fancy it sounds in the short term. The lifespan of buzzwords and trends is becoming shorter and shorter. You may want to ride those waves, but be careful not to get pulled down by the current as the wave breaks.
One of the things I love and hate the most about the tech industry is its pervasive enthusiasm for novelty. I love it because it's a massive driver of change. And I hate it because it's the highest example of societal ADHD.
We can't keep our attention on a subject for more than very short periods, as we constantly chase novelty. Investment cycles and trends in technology seem to mimic the dopamine dynamics in the human brain, just at a much broader scale.
Though it would be irresponsible to ignore such trends and dismiss them all under the buzzword label, we're seeing more of the opposite tendency: everybody and their grandmas jumping on the bandwagon of the latest transformative technology until the bandwagon runs out of gasoline. Well, hopefully, electricity one day, but given the current political environment, I guess we'll be stuck with fossil crap for a while.
The fractional wave might be just another example of popular trends that come and go. As such, I'm very careful not to tightly couple my career with such practice. Of course, I'm open to it, but I am definitely not a maximalist.
I've worked with many different people, and I always found something I could learn from anyone. Even when I happened to work with a CEO who has been arguably the worst manager, leader, and role model I have had to deal with in my career.
This person once stated proudly: our strategy is to be a leaf in the wind.
He implied that the company should refrain from defining its own direction and limit itself to following whatever the latest trend in the industry happened to be.
I obviously had a very different view at the time, and confronting such a radical position helped me clarify what I wanted my own strategy to be: focus on investments, actions, and activities that would increase my ability to control my fate.
Focus on building career capital
So, back to the original question that some people have been asking.
How do I become a Fractional CTO?
The hard answer is that you probably don't.
In most cases, that's the wrong question to ask.
Focus on creating options for yourself and finding or creating job opportunities that align with your core values. Fractional CTO might or might not be one of those opportunities, but by the time you “get there,” the trend might have already faded.
Instead of chasing the latest trend, I recommend a different approach: focus on building career capital. Build rare and valuable skills that will contribute to creating more job opportunities for yourself2. You want to catch the right waves when they show up on the horizon, but you can only do that if you've already been investing time, energy, and pain in becoming a talented surfer.
To stretch the analogy further, don't try to catch today's wave if you've never been surfing. Instead, use today's wave as an impulse to learn how to surf so that one day, you'll be able to ride the perfect wave you've been preparing for so long.
If the Fractional CTO path attracts you, start by becoming a better engineering leader today. By the time you get there, fractional roles might or might not be a thing anymore, but I'm sure you'll have more options to create a job that aligns more with your values and desires than you do today.
That's all that matters.
Focus on getting better and stay vigilant about potential new opportunities.
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As is often the case, I'm inventing very little here. Cal Newport introduced the concept of career capital in his book So Good They Can't Ignore You. If you're looking for something to read or gift during the holiday season, this is definitely one of my most recommended books. If you know me, chances are I've already mentioned it at least once in our conversations. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go get yourself a copy and thank me, or blame me later. FYI, these are affiliate links.