Are there actual examples of high-ranking engineers transitioning into tech company C-Suites? Maybe these kinds of roles shouldn't be careers, but something you do for a period of time.
it happens with CTOs. At many companies, CTO is less of a management role and more of "the leader of all of the principal engineers and source of innovation for the company". VPE reports to CTO and does the administrative side of things, CTO sets technical vision. Most other c suite type roles are generally bucketed into sales, marketing, operations, and if you are particularly unlucky: product, "Information", and human resources.
I’m just past the year Mark in being a CTO after a career as an engineer / architect. I won’t claim to be an amazing exec, but I still don’t understand how anyone could succeed in this role without having significant engineering experience. I approach this as “my turn” at playing the executive role - because I finally said to myself that there has to be someone who can code in the exec team of my next job. I intend for this to be my one and only time in a role like this - to do it well just requires more time and energy to sustain it for decades.
I've seen extremely sales / marketing oriented CTOs that worked well despite having not much / very outdated tech skills. It usually works pretty well when you have a lot of enterprise sales, and the CTO is often there to help get through procurement, relay technical requirements from sales calls, bizdevvy stuff re: integrations / platform, etc.
Every time I've seen that pattern work though, it's been paired with a very effective VP Eng, and quite a lot of autonomy on teams owing to the lack of a technical vision, or at least a technical vision that can be directly implemented (i.e. the CTO might have vague directional goals, but there's a lot of legwork required to turn that into something real).
