If you only read one thingThe CTO’s Truth Detector (12 minute read) Must, must, must read from the fabulous Etienne. “The formula is simple: Gross Margin % divided by CTO Budget %.” Most companies don’t know how many developers they need, this is good guidance, “I realize the CTO Ratio isn’t just another metric - it’s a truth detector.” Haha, “our infrastructure is bloated”. I once met a startup CTO and asked how many servers they have, because they were making quite some money. And he said, “1”. I thought this was madness at that time, I think it is genius now. CTOs neglect being excellent at fixing problems, instead they spend millions on AWS. (you rent the amount of servers you need!) Do you know the ratio of your costs vs gross margin? https://ctosub.com/p/the-ctos-truth-detector
Stories I’ve enjoyed this weekWhy Is Japan Still Investing In Custom Floating Point Accelerators? (13 minute read) The last word on what is the best hardware (Gaming graphics cards!) to run AI models on (which will also change, LLMs are not the last ones). In a tornado, it’s hard to predict the future. Japan does custom floating point accelerators. A career is a pie-eating contest & the prize for winning is more pie (1 minute read) I partially agree with this assessment “Whenever you take on ownership, you’re sending a signal to the folks around you: you’re willing to be responsible for this task. People who see you owning and completing this task will assume that you are both A) capable of handling this kind of work, and B) interested in doing more of it.” - where I differ is that it signals that you are willing to do things and capable of doing them - not only eating pies but things that must be done. I have a positive view on this, you are also going to get ice cream when you’re good at eating pies. As a manager I give the demanding projects and problems to those who have shown that they can solve problems in the past. https://jason.energy/more-pie/ Being good isn’t enough (3 minute read) “Technical skill is your chosen craft. Product thinking is knowing what’s worth doing. Project execution is making sure it happens. People skills are how you work with and influence others.” Beyond that, keep in mind: Your hard skills landed you the management position, but it’s your soft and management skills that will drive your success. https://joshs.bearblog.dev/being-good-isnt-enough/ Tempo: The Blockchain Designed for Payments (3 minute read) I wonder why this took so long, a blockchain for payments. Perhaps it wasn’t clear how to make money from this (I still have some Stellar coins somewhere from their last try). Perhaps CTOs now only need one integration instead of several ones. I wonder though, how the driver of the last years, buy now pay later, works with this alone. Perhaps this is where the money is. Liquid Glass? That’s what your M4 CPU is for (3 minute read) “Apple knows exactly what they’re doing. They’re shipping Liquid Glass now because the M4 (and M3, M2..) is absurdly overpowered for what 90% of users actually do.” I feel Apple has the best integration of marketing, product and technology, one I haven’t seen anywhere else. Product drives hardware sales because new OS releases need new hardware. Tech drives product. Marketing only talks and drowns you about things that Apple tech is great at - and ignores where Apple is weak. Like security, they made the strategic decision that security and privacy is what they outclass the competition, so they put it everywhere. This is marketing driven, with tech support, not something a techie thinks should be done. All of this is strategized. They recognized they slipped when last year they talked about AI when they were not there. So they didn’t this year. When Apple becomes good at something it was weak before, it will shift marketing, product and technology fully to this. Apple is a tightly integrated system and if people want to learn one thing from Apple, it’s not the design, it’s this. https://idiallo.com/byte-size/apple-liquid-glass No, you don’t want to hire ’the best engineers’ - Otherbranch (9 minute read) I would always love to hire the best, I’d like 5 of the best instead of 20 good ones. Things become so much easier. Sadly, I never could pay 4x the market rate to get the best, the most I could do was 20% above market, hired accordingly and sometimes got very very lucky for hiring the best (thank you for joining me, still appreciating it!) on this low salary. To hire the best as a strategy not by coincidence, you need to pay way above market or have a very strong brand (for their CV = future income vs. current income) or a very strong product pull - which I’d swear, contrary to what the founders think, you haven’t. https://www.otherbranch.com/shared/blog/no-you-dont-want-to-hire-the-best-engineers Vibe Shift in AI Coding: Senior Developers Ship 2.5x More Than Juniors | Fastly (4 minute read) “About a third of senior developers (10+ years of experience) say over half their shipped code is AI-generated — nearly two and a half times the rate reported by junior developers (0–2 years of experience), at 13%” I’m senior and I ship lots of AI code. AI amplifies your abilities. I assume it is going to break though, many seniors will get stuck on AI as a coding assistant while juniors will give up all control to reap the benefits of AI. We’ll see - and “Just under 30% of seniors reported editing AI output enough to offset most of the time savings,” Lots of nuggets in the survey though, worth a read. https://www.fastly.com/blog/senior-developers-ship-more-ai-code Pong Clock — Retro Canvas Clock (Mobile-Friendly, 4:3, Ultra-Crisp) (1 minute read) Took me a sec to understand this :-) The small web is beautiful (27 minute read) Simpler tech. “choose a backend language that has a chance, for example Rust, C or C++, or for servers, Go.” People make this out to be a tech decision, to me it’s a business decision. Does your strategy rest on a heavy UI, go for React. You need to make the tradeoff, as a CEO (not CTO!), do I want 3 frontend and 3 backend developers, or do I want 6 backend developers? Richer UI or more features? React Native instead of native iOS and Android? All of those are business decisions, not tech decisions. Don’t play the CEO. https://benhoyt.com/writings/the-small-web-is-beautiful/ Events For Engineering Managers
What is happening with Stephan?Had another AI workshop this week, for motivating developers to use AI. Again there was this dichotomy, some were very eager, some were very critical of what AIs could do. Still some influx of new clients, but ebbing down. Join the CTO newsletter! | |
