Amazing CTO | More happiness and success
đ 37.1by Stephan SchmidtHappy â Sunday, weâre near the end of the year, and many people think about their future. This often includes changing jobs.
If youâre a developer who wants to become a CTO or a CTO looking out for another job, chances are good Searching for CTO/VP Engineering on Linkedin for the United States results in 257 jobs (had to filter
out a lot). Of those 16 are above $200k. Half of them - 118 - have less than 10 applicants (your chance!). 52 of them are
remote only. And 7 of the jobs are >$200k and remote only. Yes, the time zone. But CTOs do hire
remote developers all the time and work remotely, but seldom in another country for a more interesting company and
a higher salary. Also Napster is looking for a CTO - they still exist! This weekâs insights - 𦹠Scrum Has Failed the Developers
- đť What I learned at GitLab that I donât want to forget
- đ¤ Top 10 qualities of a good CTO
Good reading, have a nice Sunday â¤ď¸ and a great week,
until the new year, Stephan 
Stats of the weekI took a look at the study âEngineering in a Hybrid World - The data behind high-functioning engineering organizationsâ
from ICONIQ which has lots of interesting data. One data point that is interesting
to developers and managers, is the ratio of engineering managers to engineers. If youâre a developer and there are not
enough managers in your org compared to the industry, a chance for promotion. If youâre a manager with too many direct
reports this is a chance to hire team leads. Key stat: In general there are 8 engineers to 1 manager. 
Stories Iâve enjoyed this weekScrum Has Failed the Developers The elephant in the room. Everyone is doing it. Most are using it as a drum-tool in the âfeature factoryâ. Developers should not have agreed to Scrum. Not because it is bad but because it can be easily exploited. Demand XP. And real Agile (which means no backlog for the next 27 years). The article confuses agile and Scrum but has some points, most boil down to âfeature factoryâ. Yes, leave. https://ageling.substack.com/p/scrum-has-failed-the-developers-547dfe09cc53 What I learned at GitLab that I donât want to forget There are many important and good points in this article. All companies I have seen are bad with decisions. âFirst, every decision needs a clear DRI (directly responsible individual) who is responsible for the final decision. If it is not clear who that person is, the first job should be to clarify that, thus clearing the way for the decision to be made in the first place.â This helped us too in two companies, highly recommended. Plus make clear how the decisions are made - e.g. by you, someone else, a majority vote by whom, etc. This clears up things and speeds them up. Recently a coachee told me they measured lead time, and more than half was spent before development started - being stuck in decisions. Something Iâve said for a long time. https://blog.boleary.dev/what-i-learned-at-gitlab-that-i-dont-want-to-forget/ Always-on services If you need it - there you go. The biggest problem I have encountered is mixed expectations. The company does not expect always-on services but developers do. Or the other way around. Or there are expectations towards always-on-services but no one wants to pay the DevOps people with the pagers. The article is gold to make it happen. If youâre doing pager duty without more money, ouch. https://www.atlassian.com/devops/what-is-devops/always-on-services Fuzzing ping ⌠and finding a 24 year old bug. We donât fuzz enough. Iâll bet if I fuzz your code I will find bugs. One reason I like Go is it makes fuzzing easy and part of the culture. Look into fuzzing today and make it part of your CI. Itâs also fun. âItâs fuzzingâ is the new âItâs compilingâ ;-) https://tlakh.xyz/fuzzing-ping.html What Is Negative Engineering? I hadnât heard the term before âBut as they waited out a rain delay, something went awry behind the scenes. A task scheduler deep within the teamâs analytics infrastructure stopped running. [âŚ] Like many tools of its kind, this one was based on cron, a decades-old workhorse for scheduling at regular intervals.â Uhuh. But âIf positive engineering is taken to mean the day-to-day work that engineers do to deliver productive, expected outcomes, then negative engineering is the insurance that protects those outcomes by defending them from an infinity of possible failures.â https://future.com/negative-engineering-and-the-art-of-failing-successfully/ Changelog is the new black Changelog to drive traffic. Would not have thought, but makes sense. âContrary to popular belief, this is a very high-quality growth move. With our regular updates, we now have almost as much traffic on our changelog as we do on our blog.â I know about the importance of feature marketing - your success as CTO depends on it! - and will add this one to my toolbelt. https://productpower.substack.com/p/changelog-is-the-new-black Here at Reddit we believe everything is better in moderation. Therefore, weâve decided to only allow ~2.2B posts on the site. 640k is enough for everybody. Youâre not using int32 anywhere, arenât you? Or is this a 10-years-down-the-line problem-for-whoever-holds-the-bag-then? https://old.reddit.com/r/shittychangelog/comments/zl5gaz/here_at_reddit_we_believe_everything_is_better_in/ How a secret software change allowed FTX to use client money The change was driven by top management. But do you know if someone would change the code in some way " to use client money"? Are your reviews robust enough? For everything, even things the DevOps people change in the production database? Limit access as much as possible, have a ticket for EVERYTHING and review changes. https://www.reuters.com/technology/how-secret-software-change-allowed-ftx-use-client-money-2022-12-13/ What Founders Need to Know Before Selling Their Startup I have experienced acquisitions - as a founder, executive and acquirer - no this is not a quote from the article. And it often didnât work well for the company acquired. But listen to the article âHow Much Can You Shape the Outcome? Far more than you think.â - be prepared for the case youâre getting acquired. And there are only two results to a startup, being acquired or going bankrupt (mostly at least). Do yourself a favor and make your life easier. Trust me on this one. https://hbr.org/2022/11/what-founders-need-to-know-before-selling-their-startup Top 10 qualities of a good CTO Yes, good ones. Go read if you want to become a CTO (you should know if you are one). My list is different. If you want to know, send me a mail. https://www.hussain.io/top-10-qualities-of-a-good-cto A Neat XOR Trick From time to time itâs good to impress developers as CTO. Perhaps use this trick at the Xmas party đ
. https://www.mattkeeter.com/blog/2022-12-10-xor/ The scourge of job-title inflation Behind a paywall. But I guess an archive is around the corner somewhere. âTitle inflation happens for reasons that are perfectly understandable. When money is tight, a bump in the title is a way of recognizing someoneâs efforts cheaply.â As a CTO coach I advise against this. Itâs easy to give a lolly pop to a child, but utmost impossible to take it back. But I was a Vice-CTO (the only ever I guess, not related to Miami Vice) for a short time. âThe currency of an inflated title quickly loses value. A senior vice-president is someone in middle management; an assistant vice-president is three years out of universityâ Welcome to my world. https://www.economist.com/business/2022/12/08/the-scourge-of-job-title-inflation Opinionated products breed passionate customers âStop building products that work for everyone and build a product that works for someone.â YES! When I look at roadmaps and features in companies - I and many developers ask the question: âFor whom is this?â and no one knows. https://www.wking.dev/library/opinionated-products-breed-passionate-customers Writing at work âMany white-collar jobs revolve around persuading others and explaining our ideasâ Or as my wife says, everything is a sales process (sheâs a sales goddess + s/sales//g). And the article has many good points about writing. If you want to be more successful as a developer or manager, get better at writing. https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/writing-at-work HUMAN_FALLBACK AI build to simulate humans. Then humans hired to simulate the AI. Full circle. https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-44/essays/human_fallback/ Is Dark Mode Good For Your Eyes? Well kind of. And it saves battery. BUT I guess it doesnât save power for my 2080TI GPU :-( https://kevquirk.com/is-dark-mode-such-a-good-idea/ The GPT-3 Architecture, on a Napkin Yes, Iâm tired too of the topic. But I guess this is essential knowledge today. https://dugas.ch/artificial_curiosity/GPT_architecture.html When life gives you lemons, write better error messages Read. If youâre a developer { read again } else { NOP }. https://wix-ux.com/when-life-gives-you-lemons-write-better-error-messages-46c5223e1a2f I wrote a story for a friend TLDR âI wrote the End Poem for Minecraft, the most popular video game of all time. I never signed a contract giving Mojang the rights to the End Poem, and so Microsoft (who bought Minecraft from Mojang) also doesnât own itâ 50+ and I play Minecraft from time to time, just to find lots of diamonds, then falling into lava. But on the topic: Is there code in your repositories that is not yours? Often the beginning of a startup is murky and anything goes. Until someone wants to acquire you. Oh and I never made it to the end of Minecraft, itâs the one game I donât need to win. And the article is about much more and worth a read to the end. I especially relate to this story as I wrote the wiki parser that Atlassian build Confluence on and got nothing back because it was open source. https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/i-wrote-a-story-for-a-friend Unpacking Boris Many of you struggle with this. Either by coming up with goals or by following goals that do not make sense to developers. âThis article explains why conventional goal-setting is usually self-defeating, and how organizations can free themselves to act more autonomously and effectively by focusing on tradeoffs instead.â https://vaughntan.org/unpacking-boris | 