Amazing CTO | More happiness and success
🚀 26.1by Stephan SchmidtHappy Sunday, This week’s insights include - 🥇 Netflix introduces levels for software engineers for the first time
- 👨‍💻 Top 10: Why are software developers unhappy?
- đź’¨ Move Fast or Die: Performance at Facebook
Good reading, have a nice Sunday ❤️ and until next week, Stephan Image of the weekAnother insight into development performance from 8 Ways to Crank Up Speed in Software Development. 
Stories I’ve encountered last week🥇 Netflix’s historic introduction of levels for software engineers Must read. Engineering levels are a topic with most of my coachees. Netflix migrated from no (!) levels to an engineering system of seniority levels. This describes the impact on how people feel about levels, touches salary bands, and fairness. Levels are good I think, I would add a Junior position to bind people early to the company. Many of the best developers I’ve met started as juniors. Also, find the Staff and Principal levels at the top - something to put definitely in your rank system. Every CTO with 10+ developers needs at least one staff engineer. The earlier you establish this, the easier. https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/netflix-levels/ 👨‍💻 On the Unhappiness of Software Developers A scientific paper that looked into the unhappiness of developers. The Top 10 - Being stuck in problem-solving 186
- Time pressure 152
- Bad code quality and coding practice 107
- Under-performing colleague 71
- Feel inadequate with work 63
- Mundane or repetitive task 60
- Unexplained broken code 57
- Bad decision-making 42
- Imposed limitation on development 40
- Personal issues – not work-related 39
https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04993 💨 Move Fast or Die: Key Startup Lessons “The most common question I get from CEOs at early-stage companies is how to move and ship products faster.” There we are again. And it’s Facebook, a site to share fake holiday pictures. Some of my coachees are in health tech or fintech, moving fast and breaking things isn’t the best way forward. BUT the article has some good tricks, and we need all the tricks we can get :-) https://blog.southparkcommons.com/move-fast-or-die/ Under Deconstruction: The State of Shopify’s Monolith A long text about how Shopify made their monolith manageable. Most interesting: They keep the monolith and don’t go Microservice I see too many startups starting with Microservices, though starting with a monolith is a good thing. And recently watched some videos about loosely coupled monoliths with an event bus - the way to go. https://shopify.engineering/shopify-monolith 🎙️ Podcast: From Prison To Programming Provoking. But should it be? https://corecursive.com/prison-programming-with-rick-wolter/ Too Many Meetings at Work? Here’s How To Stop the Meeting Madness Meetings are a good thing. They can help us decide together, align ourselves and have fun. But most meetings aren’t worth it. They are group lessons in reading power point slides or endless hours of status that could be sent better with a Slack message for those interested. I know that. The author roughly thinks the same :-) *But she created a step-by-step guide to get YOU out of your meeting misery - or even better your employees. https://betterprogramming.pub/too-many-meetings-at-work-heres-how-to-stop-the-meeting-madness-de6c9cc5cf55 AI wins state fair art contest, annoys humans People could not see the art was from an AI. For 70+ years we looked in the wrong direction for the Turing test, and then it came from the least expected direction - art. And you’ve just missed it. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/08/ai-wins-state-fair-art-contest-annoys-humans/ Why are you so busy? Sentence with deep impact: “You should only ever be busy on purpose” I see so many CTOs being busy and their teams at the limit. https://tomlingham.com/articles/why-are-you-so-busy/ What if I vanished? Just recently I had a succession discussion with a CTO who is leaving his company and is anxious about leaving the team behind. Every CTO needs to look into succession planning - read the article - but not for the reasons in the article: If you have a successor, you can go on holiday, leave the company and delegate every day the most difficult tasks that up until now you only dared to do your self. Succession planning is not about what happens if you’re hit by a bus, but about your freedom! https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/08/24/what-if-i-vanished/ An experimental new attack can steal data from air-gapped computers using a phone’s gyroscope This just blew my mind. It will blow yours. https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/24/gairoscope-air-gap-attack | 