Amazing CTO | More happiness and success
🚀 24.1by Stephan SchmidtHappy Sunday, This week’s insights include - Has an 🤖 AI created the code for your recruiting candidate?
- Create belonging: 🎑 Rituals for Engineering Teams
- đź’˛ Numbers: Oncall Compensation for Software Engineers
Good reading, nice Sunday ❤️ and until next week, Stephan Stories I’ve encountered last weekHome assignments considered harmful: AI doing the assignments Do you use home assignments for coding problems during recruiting? Universities will struggle with code assignments when AIs like Copilot can generate the code for a problem description. https://www.sigarch.org/coping-with-copilot/ Then there is this Hackernews discussion about how unpaid home assignments are not ok: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32437078 Rituals for Engineering Teams With remote work, we lost many rituals “The thing that grabbed me here is that rituals create a sense of belonging.” I see this everywhere how the lost rituals lead to employees losing the feeling of belonging. One topic with my CTO coaches is how to create more rituals (E.g. drinking coffee in a video conference each morning) to create belonging. https://charity.wtf/2022/08/15/rituals-for-engineering-teams/ Senior Engineers as mentors And while we’re at it: I advise all my CTOs to make their seniors mentor junior developers and manage interns. Not only does this help the juniors and the seniors, but it also helps YOU because it’s much easier to promote these senior developers to people manager and lead roles. So make your seniors mentor junior developers: https://franziska-hauck.medium.com/senior-engineers-as-mentors-ceb027c876d1 CTO Shadow Program Do you have a CTO shadow program? Every CTO should think about her replacement and groom a successor. Not only does this help the company in the case that you’re leaving, but it also helps you tremendously because you can send someone to a meeting if you don’t have the time and can delegate the most delicate tasks to someone. One way to train the successor is a shadow program. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/shadow/ Second Order Thinking As engineers, we have too much second-order thinking. Most CEOs have no second-order thinking. And then we clash. Understanding the concept and explaining it to your CEO makes your life easier, the company more successful, and everyone happier https://fs.blog/second-order-thinking/ Happiness Is Two Scales Developer happiness will become a larger issue with more and more remote work. Although they seem to become happier, it isn’t that easy. Remote work may just remove unhappiness from commutes. I think the concept of
“happiness is two scales " is very powerful for developer happiness. https://www.atvbt.com/happiness-is-two-scales/ In-App browsers inject Javascript into your website Did you know that in-app browsers inject Javascript into your website? And keylog every keystroke back to their masters, even password fields? I didn’t know and it scares me. You might want to take precautions! https://krausefx.com/blog/announcing-inappbrowsercom-see-what-javascript-commands-get-executed-in-an-in-app-browser Accounting For Developers Sometimes I have a discussion with my coachees about what to expect from a CTO. Or what makes a senior developer a senior developer? For me, I expect business understanding from both roles. Without understanding business, you can’t be a senior. Without understanding accounting, you can’t be a CTO. Development is about making tradeoffs and the best decisions. Without knowing business this isn’t possible. When I moved to the management board of an eBay company, people expected me to know a lot of business and accounting terms - E.g. for my budget - I had no clue. Here is a good guide to get you, and your seniors, started: https://www.moderntreasury.com/journal/accounting-for-developers-part-i Inside the Layoffs at Klarna It feels like Klarna did everything wrong that you can do wrong. Employees learning details from a Techcrunch article, pre-recorded CEO videos, and mysterious meeting invitations. Laying off people is a big topic, something I always dreaded especially if I had to lay off people for economical reasons. But whatever you do, think about the people involved. Those being laid off and those staying behind. It’s a moral duty to not make it as pleasant as possible for you and make everyone else feels more miserable. https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/layoffs-at-klarna/ Oncall Compensation for Software Engineers On-call payment dollar numbers! https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/oncall-compensation/ | 