<a href="https://www.miserablyemployed.com/blogs/news/im-the-cto-now" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">🧨 Read the full original rant from Miserably Employed:
</a>
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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:
<ul>
<li>
The CEO is still slinging “quick ideas” like pancakes at a bad diner.
</li>
<li>
The investors want “roadmap clarity,” even though we’re actively sinking.
</li>
<li>
The interns? Logging into Figma every morning like it means something.
</li>
</ul>
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.
<img src="https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--196K6qve--/f_auto/v1747821007/ugc/content_85859db0-48e1-4078-9d90-c2cc18cdaf8e?_a=BAMClqUq0" alt="I'm the CTO now t-shirt">
Get the t-shirt here: <a href="https://www.miserablyemployed.com/products/im-the-cto-now-t-shirt" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">https://www.miserablyemployed.com/products/im-the-cto-now-t-shirt</a>
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Dev Squad

This post humorously narrates the author's unexpected rise to CTO amidst chaos in a failing startup. With most of the team quitting, the author becomes the CTO not out of ambition but exhaustion. They struggle with managing an inherited mess of tech and responsibilities, highlighting the burnout and absurdity in the tech industry. The narrative illustrates the often unplanned path to leadership and the challenges that come with sustaining a sinking ship.

I'm the CTO now

“I’m not a visionary. I’m not agile. I’m not optimizing anything.”
those words hit me right in the heart.
imho, if you are not visionary for your company you are working now, at least, you should be a visionary for yourself.
be agile for yourself,
be optimize for your life.

Oh wow! This is—different. Thanks for sharing!

[
“I”,
“fix”,
“broken”,
“codebases.”,
“Hit”,
“me”,
“up”,
“if”,
“yours”,
“needs”,
“rescuing.”
];

I love the open bluntness of this. Thanks for sharing.
The depressing part is, this is basically all how I feel except I’m not the CTO. lol

I feel like I could have written this article myself. Jesus… I’m not alone…