Are Non-Technical Engineering Leaders Common?

I recently saw a question on Reddit asking how common it is to have non-technical engineering leaders. The person who asked the question works in a company with an engineering leader, either a CTO or director, who has good communication and presentation skills but uses lots of buzzwords.

The answer to this question isn’t straightforward. Some primary considerations are the company, its stage, and what the engineering organization needs. There are various types of engineering leaders, including:

1. Technical founding CTOs who write code with their team and set up the foundation for the entire company, along with its architecture and key decisions.
2. Growth-oriented engineering leaders who focus on onboarding, career development, interviewing, and hiring. They are more process-driven and less technical than founding CTOs (this is where I see myself most often).
3. Architectural-driven leaders who have strong opinions about the tech stack and how things should be built. They don’t get into the nitty-gritty details but provide broad guidance on the direction of the codebase.
4. Extremely non-technical leaders who may have never written code but understand how the organization functions and work well across groups.