Amazing CTO | More happiness and success
🚀 #4 2022by Stephan SchmidtHappy Friday, everyone is suffering because of recruiting. It was bad twenty years ago and
got worse from year to year. Demand rises, remote work has increased competition
between companies and everyone struggles. So you’re not alone. Most of my coachees suffer too, only some miraculously prosper in this environment
with steady hiring. As soon as I find out more, I’ll let you know. Recently I’ve read on Business Insider “Many of the over 350,000 workers Amazon hired from July to October stayed with the company “just days or weeks,” the report said.”. And I did hear that Google has tremendous problems hiring in Germany too. And
if they can’t hire people with the best (still?) tech employer brand, how can anyone else? So do your best, and keep the tweet for this week in mind. As for the articles, good reading, nice weekend and until next week, Stephan I keep telling this to people, fix your turnover, then look at hiring more people.
Not only does keeping your developers 
Interesting ArticlesHard to work with. From the excellent Will Larson - author of “An Elegant Puzzle” - comes with a thought provoking peace.
“The main character is trying to do their job effectively, but can’t due to the low performance of a peer.” is
something I see over and over again. https://lethain.com/hard-to-work-with/ How I operated as a Staff engineer at Heroku The staff engineer role is coming up more and more - luckily. CTOs have been doing too many things
in the past, and staff engineers is one model to reduce the CTO load by having engineeers do work
beside devlopment. The concept isn’t clear cut yet, so all ideas help. This article has some of these. https://amyunger.com/blog/2020/09/10/staff-engineer-at-heroku.html Finding Waldo in π I found this one curious and fascinating,
There are an infinite numbers in Pi. We know that, but we do not realize what that means. Here a GIF image is
seen as numbers, and those numbers seeked in Pi. And they are there! Starting from the 23,074,248th digit. https://kundor.github.io/Finding-Waldo/ Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out A truism, sure. But with some numbers and a model. I can’t hammer the point to developers
often enough, it’s not about easy writing, it’s about easy reading of code and comprehension
of systems. https://lepiter.io/feenk/developers-spend-most-of-their-time-figuri-9q25taswlbzjc5rsufndeu0py/ In-Depth: Stable Or Fluid Teams? What Does The Science Say? I didn’t hear about the concept of a fluid team. My personal opinion, most teams are not teams at all. If you
do not stand in for each other, know each other and care for each other, you’re not a team. So most teams aren’t.
This article though goes into more research about teams. https://medium.com/the-liberators/in-depth-stable-or-fluid-teams-what-does-the-science-say-95833b0b91a2 Work Is Work “Most explanations of organizational success or failure are crap” should make you interested enough to read this article :-) https://codahale.com/work-is-work/ The Ultimate Guide to Onboarding Software Engineers A topic dear to my heart. Companies spend so much time and effort and pain in hiring
and then let the new hire slip when she starts working because of bad onboarding.
My mantra for a long time has been “The goal of hiring is not signing a contract,
but having a happy and successful employee”. In depth article! 🤩 https://leadership.garden/onboarding-engineers/ Mourning as a Remote Team Remote work changes more things than you think. What happens if someone gets ill or dies?
“His Wife Had to Create a Support Ticket” can’t be the new reality. https://www.sofuckingagile.com/blog/mourning-loss-as-a-remote-team How many jobs can be done at home? More and more remote work leads to the question: “How many jobs can be done at home?” “37%” “But …” “37%, there is a study about it”. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272720300992 How to tell if you’ve found true product-market fit I have worked with many CTOs over the past years, and the one thing that pops up over and over again: The company is
not aligned about the stage they are in (If you want my startup stage for CTO model, email me :-) And the key moment
is product market fit. Too many people (marketing!) think they have found it, but they haven’t. As before and after needs
completely different tools and behaviours, companies struggle if half of the people believe different things.
“one big danger facing startup founders is the premature belief that you’ve found product-market fit.” sums it up. https://eniacvc.medium.com/how-to-tell-if-youve-found-true-product-market-fit-853a93664af4 Software Leviathans Software Leviathans is an interesting idea. “But development is slow per engineer and code quality is not clearly superior to industry best practices.” https://www.sledgeworx.io/software-leviathans/ 📚 Book of the weekNo book of the week this time, read the three books of the last three newsletters first! | 