Amazing CTO | More happiness and success
🚀 31.1

by Stephan Schmidt

Happy ☀ Sunday,

the sun is shining, this week the newsletter is shorter, but I had to read more articles than ever before. Many headlines sounded interesting, but after reading, OUT. So I’ve spared you a lot of articles that sounded good on the outside, yes never judge a book by it’s cover and all.

This week’s insights I’ve kept

• 💨 How to maintain engineering velocity as you scale
• ☁ Cloud costs are in a bubble
• 🏢 You’re losing candidates: Most People Never Finish Online Applications

Good reading, have a nice Sunday evening ❤️ and until next week,

Stephan

Stories I’ve enjoyed this week

How to maintain engineering velocity as you scale

The holy grail, engineering (what engineering? - see other article) velocity. Everyone struggles. Every coachee asks me on how to go faster. But of course YCombinator has some good points to stay fast while scaling, including my silver bullet Keeping teams small and independent (Yes there are no silver bullets, that’s the reasons vampires exist)

https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/how-to-maintain-engineering-velocity-as-you-scale

Startup Engineering Hiring Anti-Patterns

“Hiring great engineers has always been hard. It feels especially hard nowadays.” Me 2005. And the article 2022. If you struggle with hiring developers, GREAT read. “Comfort in the False Negative Zone” is something I especially like. At one company I had the feeling we’re saying no too often and too easily, based on the CV. So I introduced phone screens to listen to more people and used a CV only to find red flags (I still use CVs only to find red flags). I think I’ve said it before, great article.

https://blog.southparkcommons.com/startup-engineering-hiring-anti-patterns/

Most People—92%—Never Finish Online Job Applications

I always had a good relationship with people in HR, and I urge you to have one too. I went there - pre-remote - every day to have a chat and some coffee. Relationships are built by interaction, something most people seem to have forgotten in this remote age. HR helps you with people development, education budgets, hiring, and firing. One thing I didn’t like is how HR doesn’t seem to be aware of funnels and numbers, contrary to marketing for example. So most people do not complete applications 1.) HR doesn’t seem to know 2.) As I’ve been saying for decades, everything more than providing a Linkedin link is expecting too much from a candidate. In a buyers’ market, it’s not about making your job easy, but that of the candidate!

https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/most-people-never-finish-online-job-applications.aspx

Four Steps to Organizational Change Without the Drama

Change is difficult. Too many CTOs think and present the facts, and everyone changes, bang. But it isn’t working that way. Communication and preparation are key. Excellent article. Could have written this myself, but not with as many insights or fancy words. Worth the read if you need to change something (and who doesn’t?)

https://medium.com/glia-tech/four-steps-to-organizational-change-without-the-drama-4790fd6b8c72

What is “engineering for software?”

Recently a coachee asked me if they should look for software engineers to get better developers. As I never understood the difference and couldn’t see any engineering in software, I wondered. “the application of an empirical, scientific approach to finding efficient solutions to practical problems.” I never saw the science in our industry, but gut decisions and fashion hype. The article contains some thoughts on how to do more engineering.

https://github.com/readme/guides/engineering-for-software

Comparing common programming languages’ performance

It doesn’t matter what programming language you use. Mostly (It should be reasonably mainstream and have many supported libraries)

If you’re on a budget it matters a lot, the difference in performance is enormous. This article has some performance comparisons. On the same hardware, Rust gets 2839 reqs/second while Deno (JS/Node) gets 286. Yes, benchmarks but you would need many more servers with Deno to get the same performance levels for your customers compared to using Rust. And I was astonished that Go was slightly slower than Rust when one of Golangs goals is performance, while that of Rust is security.

https://github.com/losvedir/transit-lang-cmp

Students are acing their homework by turning in machine-generated essays. Good.

Students let AI generate their homework. Duh! “I don’t condone cheating. But I think the availability of text generators will force changes to education which, while painful, will prove to be positive.” Yes, we haven’t even seen the tip of the iceberg. I don’t think we know what the iceberg is yet.

https://aisnakeoil.substack.com/p/students-are-acing-their-homework

Website Fidelity

Some thought-provoking ideas. Must read.

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/website-fidelity/

Securing a Github repo is a ton of work.

It’s difficult to secure Github. Did you wake up at night and think “Hopefully none committed a secret to git?” I think hardening Github is for everyone. Send the link to one of your engineers to make your Github more secure and let you sleep better. Oh, and most of my coachees don’t use hardware tokens and 2FA for Github. Duh! Be better!

https://codeofhonor.substack.com/p/securing-a-github-repo-is-a-ton-of

Cloud costs are in a bubble

(This one went away, lucky for us there is the web archive)

I’ve said this for decades. No one is listening. Calculating DevOps costs with vague numbers just to make your case? “I’ve been there, I’ve seen that - it’s bullshit.” Me too, and we didn’t meet. Now as this is on an investor website, there is trouble coming for AWS pricing and usage.

http://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://www.the-investing-desk.com/cloud-costs-are-in-a-bubble/

DevOps is Bullshit

I don’t know after a decade what DevOps is, so I read that with interest. “Cost management? Deleting unused cloud resources? Nope, we’ve got AWS credits to burn! 🔥” Hah, dear CTO, see what your developers are thinking?

https://blog.massdriver.cloud/devops-is-bullshit

We’re drowning

“And yet, we’re drowning. We slap together rickety rowboats and toss them out on PyPI Ocean and npm Sea, then act surprised when the changes flood in. We ignore the flood as long as we can, then patch the holes with duct tape and bilge pumps as if they can hold back the tide. They cannot.”

https://snarfed.org/2022-03-10_were-drowning-software-dependencies