CTO mostly focuses on a form rather than substance, he cares deeply about naming things (how HE believes they should be, be ready to become a psychic), but ignores much deeper problems in the development process.
For example, postmortems are written, but never discussed, sometimes after a heavy outage the conclusion is "we did everything right, it is just a coincidence", pretty much every second one. Usually no action but saying "do good, don't do bad" is taken.
He surrounded himself with a bunch of yes-men platform team, which feels like more a pool of developers for personal pet projects rather than team that should help others.
The only team whose time is valuable, is the platform team, they (or even CTO himself) can introduce breaking changes overnight and then the rest of the backend will do nothing for a couple of days but fix builds in their projects. A cherry on top: whole company uses same stack of dependencies without proper versioning, often reinventing the wheel.
Be ready to receive at least once a week a message in a developers slack channel about new ridiculous changes in the development process that you need to remember to follow with zero effort to automate things.
The most suffering people from these processes are POs who can't really plan to deliver features, since developers are distracted with BS tasks coming from platform/CTO on a daily basis.
Public shaming is also a part of the culture, sometimes CTO drags a link to bitbucket into a public chat to let everyone to discuss what is wrong (in his opinion) with this particular piece of code.
