What are your responsibilities as a web developer?

Can it be detrimental to adopt the title 'startup CTO' instead of 'web developer'?

• A few years ago if you scrabbled together a web app, you still called yourself a web developer. But in the meantime there seems to be a kind of title inflation where the new breed of web developers feel entitled to call themselves CTO for much the same product as was produced formerly by the "web dev". If you were hiring a web developer and his job title was such up until he recently completed a web app that was significant enough to call itself a "startup" (there is often considerable latitude in that term itself), would you hold it against him and consider him presumptuous, arrogant, entitled, a "brat", etc? Or would you consider it an appropriate exercise of "self-esteem"? From my perspective, it seems the CTO title should be reserved for someone who really is battled tested in numerous tech environments rather than in the often limited scope of developing a web app - especially the types of simple web apps that count as "startups" recently. But perhaps it also serves as a yoke for a hiring manager to keep the little ones happy by letting them keep their nice titles in place of the level of compensation that a more senior CTO might expect? So, all in all, does it help or hurt to call yourself CTO in these cases?

• Answer:

  An actual CTO is responsible for a lot more than a web developer is.  It would take no more than a few questions to discern which role someone actually performed.  If you're legitimately performing the CTO function, then you should be called a CTO.  In a very small company, it is not uncommon for a CTO to also have another role.  For example, I held the position for both CTO and VP of Engineering for a couple years at one startup before the company got big enough that we split those roles into two people and I handed off the VP of Engineering to someone else.  In a really small company, the CTO may also be one of the main developers.  If you're not actually performing a CTO role, but you called yourself one, then you will probably not look good in the eyes of an interviewer when they discover that.  They will wonder what else you say about yourself is not quite as you say. Exactly how the CTO role is defined can vary from one organization to another based on the type of business and the strengths of the other senior execs, but here are some things it can entail: A member of the executive team of the company - part of most important company decisions Guides technology direction within the technical parts of the company Technical spokesperson for the company (press, major customers, investors, etc...) Supporting role in technical aspects of important sales activities Advanced product development - experimentation and prototyping to help prove out and/or define next generation products Key player in strategic direction of the company Key player in defining product strategy and product direction to fulfill the company strategy