Amazing CTO | More happiness and success
🚀 Issue 11.1

by Stephan Schmidt

Happy Friday,

I have been to the CTO summit in Hamburg, Germany. Several interesting insights from David Heinemeier Hansson about small companies and their correlation to job satisfaction. But the main point for me was the insight from Christian Hardenberg, CTO Delivery Hero. A shoutout, great talk. When Delivery Hero grew by acquiring other platforms, his engineering reflex was to build one platform to rule them all. Over time they’ve learned that for them it’s better to have seven platforms distributed around the globe instead of one. I wondered where my engineering reflexes have been wrong. Where have yours been wrong?

This week’s insights include

• ⛅ the new CTO Job Market Weather Report
• A 📚 book recommendation about analytics
• The Supermarket of Software - think more like a supermarket
• What is 🦸 Super-structured Data

Good reading, nice weekend ❤️ and until next week,

Stephan

⛅ CTO Job Market Weather

How is the CTO job market? The numbers for the US are flat, for Germany I have seen an increase to 46 CTO jobs on Indeed. This is the highest number of CTO jobs in Germany since I’m checking the numbers, hurray! Perhaps it is still time to get a new job before the recession. Also 9 are labeled as remote.

Stories I’ve encountered last week

The Supermarket of Software

A text about product marketing. Nothing for CTOs? Au contraire mon ami! I argue with every coachee on the importance of product marketing. Your success as CTO is not bound to the technical challenges you solve (if you’re not the SpaceX CTO), but on the success of the features and products, you build. If your company does a poor product marketing job (and feature marketing!), you’ll pay for it. With a successful product and you building successful features (that customers use because of product marketing) developers get a feel of purpose and you get whatever you want from your CEO.

https://www.svpg.com/the-supermarket-of-software/

Super-structured Data: Rethinking the Schema

Never heard of the term “Super-structured Data”. I found the article interesting beyond the explanation of the concept, it goes deep into schemaless vs. schema-based data. I might take even something away for my programming language (Hiro!).

https://www.brimdata.io/blog/super-structured-data/

The saddest “Just Ship It” story ever

Another developer lost it in “React Native, Expo, GraphQL” and never shipped. Radical simplicity to the rescue and you can ship more earlier. READ!

https://kitze.io/posts/saddest-just-ship-it-story-ever

The Other Kind of Staff Software Engineer

Staff engineers are the next big topic in software development. Read to clue up.

https://earthly.dev/blog/line-staff/

Why we built the best search engine for coders — Introducing YouCode

AI makes inroads into development, “Let AI generate code based on your search query with Code Complete, an app that taps into a large neural net to autocomplete any developer-related query.” I wonder how good this is in practice, but more and more of these tools pop up. If you haven’t looked into this as a CTO, the time to do so is now.

https://blog.you.com/why-we-built-the-best-search-engine-for-coders-introducing-youcode-da38d058fe9f

Thoughts on OKRs

Everyone does them. Most of the people I see using them do them wrong.

https://joeblu.com/blog/2022_05_okrs/

😉 Parmigiano Reggiano Makers Are Embedding Tiny Trackers in the Rind to Fight Cheese Fraud

My credo is that CTOs need to drive technical innovation. To fight fraud, cheese producers are putting a chip in the rind of their cheese. This is the kind of innovation CTOs need to provide to drive business success and make themselves relevant. Sometimes out-of-the-box thinking is needed. Do you? Also: Don’t eat the rind or you might eat a tracker 😉

https://www.foodandwine.com/news/parmigiano-reggiano-fraud-micro-transponder-rinds-digital-label

The Future of Search Is Boutique

Must read “These days, I find myself suppressing the garbage Internet by searching on Google for “Substack + future of learning” on the failure of Google (I still use it!)

https://future.a16z.com/the-future-of-search-is-boutique/

Microsoft to boost employee pay in effort to stop attrition

Up, up it goes. “The Redmond-based software maker is nearly doubling its global merit budget this year”. The article also mentions Amazon doubling its maximum base pay from $160k to $350k.

https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2022/05/16/microsoft-pay-increases-competition-amazon.html

So you want to run a virtual event

Don’t we all? I have been to many virtual events, and most were bad. Only a few, like the CTO Craft events, were nice and very useful. Or put it another provocative way “A question I ask to a lot of event organizers is “why are you producing a live stream instead of a YouTube playlist?”

https://blog.lazerwalker.com/2022/05/10/virtual-events.html

📚 Book of the week

This week’s book is “Lean Analytics” by Alistair Croll & Benjamin Yoskovitz. This book is great for two reasons: First it has a set of base metrics for every business model like content-based or SaaS with which you can start from day one (and you should start from day one, data that is never collected can never be regained). Second, it goes into a deeper discussion on what a good metric is and what isn’t. This book keeps being the book I grab when I want to refresh on metrics or want to hand out a book to a coachee.