Amazing CTO | More happiness and success
🚀 Issue 12.1

by Stephan Schmidt

Happy Friday,

This week’s insights include

• A 📚 book recommendation about hard things
• 🤫 The Silent Meeting
• When Everything is ❗ Important But Nothing is Getting Done
• ☃️Winter is coming: Klarna lays off 700 staff

Good reading, nice weekend ❤️ and until next week,

Stephan

Article of the week

When Everything is Important But Nothing is Getting Done

“Everything was high priority, nothing ever seemed to get completed, morale was low, and it was starting to coalesce into a learned helplessness” Sounds familiar? How do you get out of that? A thorough guide:

https://sharedphysics.com/everything-is-important/

Stories I’ve encountered last week

Klarna to cut 10% of staff as it warns of recession

The recession is coming, prepare for it. Klarna is laying off 700 staff which is 10%. I’m not sure this is enough. Cut early and deep.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/klarna-cut-10-staff-warns-071757165.html

🤫 The Silent Meeting Manifesto v1: Making meeting suck a little less

Silent meetings, who would have known! At least this is an interesting idea. We will try out many more things when we want remote to get working, this might be one of them.

https://medium.com/swlh/the-silent-meeting-manifesto-v1-189e9e3487eb

Ask HN: What to do when the company is stretched thin?

Very interesting discussion. Hackernews is always hit and miss and the discussion thread is a hit. At least you can see what is going on in other companies.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31501384

Quick fixes to your code review workflow

Code reviews done right are THE quality tool to prevent bugs. Sadly most code reviews I have seen are done wrong, without a checklist, just personal opinions and debate. This is a good guide on reviews, from the basics to more advanced ideas with “Decide what review is actually for”. If you are a CTO and haven’t given guidance on code reviews, you’re doing it wrong and could save a lot of your time.

https://consulting.drmaciver.com/code-review-quick-fixes/

Migrating millions of lines of code to TypeScript

Still using Javascript? Don’t. “On Sunday March 6, we migrated Stripe’s largest JavaScript codebase (powering the Stripe Dashboard) from Flow to TypeScript. In a single pull request, we converted more than 3.7 million lines of code. The next day, hundreds of engineers came in to start writing TypeScript for their projects.”

https://stripe.com/blog/migrating-to-typescript

📚 Book of the week

This week’s book is “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz. Why does EVERYONE need to read this book? There are many insights, but the one for every CTO is to stop politics around promotions and salary increases. And astonishingly to reorgs. Too often do I see coachees without a transparent salary and promotion process. I always give them this book to read. Again, politics increase your workload and reduce morale. Do yourself a favor and read this book.