I'm the CTO now

This is a satirical article. Don't take it too seriously.

You know that moment in every crappy disaster movie where someone, usually the most reluctant idiot in the room, ends up in charge just because everyone else is either dead or screaming?

Tag, you're it.

You're the CTO now.

Not because you earned it. Not because you wanted it.

But because you're the last one left. Everyone else bailed, had their positions eliminated, or got straight up fired. They walked out with cardboard boxes full of ergonomic keyboards, unread startup books, and whatever scraps of self-worth they hadn’t already sold for stock options.

But you're still here.

Modern corporate work sucks. Let’s just get that out of the way. You spend your entire adult life being told that dedication leads to recognition. That if you grind hard enough, some magical executive will pat you on the back, take you to some shady backroom billionaire-only get-together, hand you a raise, and maybe give you an extra Friday off once in a while. Instead, you get endless Slack messages at 11 PM asking if the staging server is down. You get JIRA tickets written by product managers who have never used the app they’re building (and questionably, any app). You get shouted at in meetings for not “thinking like an owner,” whatever the hell that means when your options are underwater and the runway is a myth.

Now you're the CTO. Fantastic. That just means you're the one stuck holding the flaming trash bag that is the codebase you've been begging them to let you rewrite for 3 years. You get to sit through product calls where people who’ve never written a single line of HTML demand to know why you haven’t “shipped AI integration” yet. You babysit the interns because your company can’t afford actual engineers anymore (maybe even just AI bots now). You get daily reminders of all the horrible code that went into your project by devs that are no longer there.

Are you exhausted yet? No? You want more pain? Every week there’s a new framework to learn. A new feature to ship. A new “reorg” that’s supposed to make you more “agile” but just makes everything worse. The list continues.

Miserably Employed isn't a brand, we don't use stupid buzzwords here. This is a rebellion for people just like you, because we are you. We're anonymous without the masks, public figures standing in defiance of the corporate bullshitery that plagues our modern work world.

You're still going to show up at work, as the untitled CTO of the company. Except now you have a mission, a reason. You're there to send a statement. Stubborn spite. Keep the servers alive, collect that paycheck, but make every waking moment spent with management's bullshit a subtle reminder to them, front and center, that you can clearly see reality. You are not naive enough to know that they don't know what the fuck they are doing.

Because you're the CTO now.

So if you’re out there, still clinging to some garbage job in a collapsing startup, just know you’re not alone.

The world doesn’t care. (But we do).