Amazing CTO | More happiness and success
🚀 39.2by Stephan SchmidtHappy 🌞 Sunday, I’ve recently re-read Zen Mind, and Beginner’s Mind - but this is not a book review. The idea of the book is highly relevant to CTOs - for ourselves and the people we hire and guide: A beginner’s mind is open to everything. A beginner’s mind is hard to keep. As a CTO we’re the most experienced tech person in the company. We have seen many things. We’re experts. As the book says, the mind of the expert is closed, they don’t have options, and everything is determined. If you’re a beginner, your mind is open, and you have all the options available to you. As CTOs we need to open our minds again, become beginners, and our minds become beginner’s minds. During my career, I made many decisions as an expert (before I refused to make most of the decisions and encouraged others to make them). I was sure of those decisions because I was the most experienced in the room. I’ve seen it all. Years later reflecting on those decisions I saw how limited as an expert I was making them. With a beginner’s mind, we think out of the box and do not optimize local maxima but look for leaps forward. We’re open to ideas from other people. I once met a manager at eBay who left her last company after ten years. The reason? Whatever someone new in the company said, she had seen it already and said “We have done that, been there”. After realizing her closed expert mind, she changed jobs to again have an open beginner’s mind. Begin. This week’s insights - 🤖 Programmer salaries in the age of ChatGPT
- 🦹 A Human-Centered Approach to Developer Productivity
- đź’» Results of investing 10% to pay back tech debt
Good reading, have a nice Sunday ❤️ and a great week, Stephan If you only read one thing20 Things I’ve Learned in my 20 Years as a Software Engineer Some wonderful insights. In particular, I like “The hardest part of the software is building the right thing” because every company I look into builds mostly the wrong things. If I see the roadmap, I wonder “Do they want to have success, but why are they doing these things then?” Also: “We should be far more focused on avoiding 0.1x programmers than finding 10x programmers” https://www.simplethread.com/20-things-ive-learned-in-my-20-years-as-a-software-engineer/ Stories I’ve enjoyed this weekA Human-Centered Approach to Developer Productivity Worth the read, it has nuggets like “Software Developers Are Humans” YES! Elementary, my dear Watson. But still, CEOs don’t get this and CTOs are not pushing hard enough. Developers are not cogs. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9994260 We invested 10% to pay back tech debt; Here’s what happened A very good in-depth read on technical debt (never call it that outside of tech!). https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/tech-debt-day How to Create Luck Don’t we all need a little luck? When Columbo (one of my favorites) is asked about his work, he claims luck is a good part of it. When I look at my career, luck is a good part of it (my girlfriend leaving was the Kickstarter - luck is weird). “My entire worldview changed when I realized that luck can be created.” https://www.swyx.io/create-luck/ Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs LLM=Large language models=ChatGPT if you didn’t know the jargon (I had to Google, sigh). What happens to programmer salaries? https://milkyeggs.com/?p=303 Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies A thought-provoking article. “The software project and its programmers are an indivisible and organic entity that our industry treats like a toy model made of easily replaceable lego blocks. They believe a software project and its developers can be broken apart and reassembled without dying.” I was most successful, when the churn of the team was near zero. Many of my coachees are successful when the churn is near zero. Here is a theory. https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2022/theory-building/ Velocity defeats itself. Get acceleration instead Some nice pictures of spherical cows. An understanding of velocity in software development and an argument for measuring acceleration. “Therefore, improve acceleration in software teams by doing work to reduce mass.” I’m not a fan of velocity or any measure for defining speed. If leads to a feature factory (all roads seem to lead to a feature factory instead of Rome). Which doesn’t mean you should learn how to go faster. https://jessitron.com/2022/12/22/velocity-defeats-itself-get-acceleration-instead/ Please avoid these 7 common mistakes when working with OKRs Everyone does OKRs. Everyone does them wrong. If they work for you as a CTO, fine (I doubt it). Otherwise, read here. https://medium.com/@BenjaminBolland/please-avoid-these-7-common-mistakes-when-working-with-okrs-bf38a24c5985 Part II: The failure points from $5m to $100m in ARR Another O.M.G. post. Everything in this post is good. “Our trickiest inflection point was hitting Dunbar’s number — at 150 people, everything went to chaos.” I’d argue it happens at 50+ but yes. https://tracy.posthaven.com/part-ii-the-failure-points-from-$5m-to-$100m-in-arr Microservices is a Big Ball of Mud “Many candidates proudly told tales of how they developed their projects with a microservice architecture. Often [..] it does not require many questions to see that they used a rocket launcher to kill a mouse. Microservices are hard.” I feel the tipping point, don’t you? https://code-held.com/2022/07/28/microservices/ The Product Decision Stack – Martin Eriksson Many companies I see struggle with the gap from idea to delivery. They don’t have a vision/strategy framework in place. And if they do it, it’s more cargo culting. But you need “What should we do? Why are we doing that? How do we want to do it?” Start here. https://www.mindtheproduct.com/the-product-decision-stack-martin-eriksson/ Steve Blank Is a Venture Studio Right for You? Good read on a seldom talked about topic from the expert in the field “Three types of organizations – Incubators, Accelerators, and Venture Studios – have emerged to reduce the risk of early-stage startup failure by helping teams find product/market fit and raise initial capital” https://steveblank.com/2023/01/17/is-a-venture-studio-right-for-you/ subverting the software interview Although I don’t like category theory, I enjoyed this one. And the punch line. https://nliu.net/posts/2021-03-19-interview.html Tech Companies Are Irrational Pop Cultures I always say our industry is a pop culture - or fashion industry. But what does it mean? https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/tech-is-a-pop-culture/ Names should be cute, not descriptive Yes. https://ntietz.com/blog/name-your-projects-cutesy-things/ 📚 Book of the weekA classic of modern Zen literature. But if you’re not into Zen - but you could - it’s interesting on many points for us CTOs, for example, the story of the four horses I found amusing. Or about calmness. So here it is, a short book, even if it’s not about tech (ha!). 
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