ÂťNEWÂŤ CTO Job MarketNEW Weekly search on the open positions for CTOs in the US, Germany and the UK. So you can find out if itâs a good time to look out for a new job. Source payscale.com, Indeed.com Search: +title:cto +title:"chief technology officer" Stopwords: staff, assistant, assistenz, analyst, werkstudent, stabsstelle, clinical, partner, team, office of, audit, tax, worker, supervisor, cto office, coach If you only read one thingThe product manager role is a mistake (12 minute read) Iâve often talked about this, and itâs dear to my heart. Donât give control to product managers. Happily, I see more and more engineers and CTOs again become creators. Long, but needed quotes: âOften, they think âWe donât want to be a service organization, but a product company. Product companies are product-led, hence product managers should be in charge.â (This is a terrible misunderstanding, but a popular one: product-led does not mean having PMs in charge.) and âSo, sure, if you can find someone tremendous, youâre willing to get out of their way, and you can cope with their intensity, by all means give them control over your product and company. Theyâll produce extraordinary things. Good chances are, though, that you wouldnât be able to find them, that they wouldnât want to work for you or with you, and that you wouldnât be able to tolerate their ego and burning intensity.â Much, much more in the article.* Tweet of the weekI do think AI changes everything, yes also managers (also see the allocation article down in the newsletter).
Comic of the week
From: https://xkcd.com/2881/
Stories Iâve enjoyed this weekBalancing Engineering Cultures: Debate Everything vs. Just Tell Me What To Build (10 minute read) This article gets much deeper and is worth a read, all of it. My general take on this? There is time for YES and time for NO (debate). Engineers focus on debate at the wrong time (at the beginning). Product managers think too much before they talk to engineers (debate too late). https://www.fishmanafnewsletter.com/p/balancing-engineering-cultures-debate-vs-do Backlog size is inversely proportional to how often you talk to customers (8 minute read) I do think the most important task of a startup CEO is to talk to customers. The CEO needs to be the best expert in and on the market and those customers. If you donât spend 50% of your time learning about your problem domain, youâre doing it wrong. Donât make assumptions, go out! âInstead of spending time planning and concocting roadmaps, replace that activity by talking to current or potential customers on how their lives can be improved, and letting that determine your next feature.â
https://bitbytebit.substack.com/p/the-size-of-your-backlog-is-inversely The Knowledge Economy Is Over. Welcome to the Allocation Economy (15 minute read) Very interesting and important idea about the coming (?) allocation economy! âEven junior employees will be expected to use AI, which will force them into the role of managerâmodel manager. Instead of managing humans, theyâll be allocating work to AI models and making sure the work gets done well. Theyâll need many of the same skills as human managers of today do (though in slightly modified form).â https://every.to/chain-of-thought/the-knowledge-economy-is-over-welcome-to-the-allocation-economy The Hacker News Top 40 books of 2023 (6 minute read) An alluring list. âGĂśdel, Escher, Bachâ on 3rd. âThe Mythical Man-Monthâ on 6th. âPeoplewareâ 13th. âHigh Output Managementâ on 21st. And many more good books. https://hnreads.com/post/top40_2023/ Security for Startups (2 minute read) Oh my, so basic. So useful. So often neglected, even these basics. Make it a checklist and implement all of it (although it will make some developers unhappy, but why risk the company?). https://chris-haarburger.com/posts/security_startups.html Indexing iCloud Photos with AI Using LLaVA and pgvector (12 minute read) I feel like everyone needed to know relational databases for decades now (I remember the time when this wasnât the case in the 80s and early 90s)âtoday people need to know about vector databases to store âAI dataâ. is one, and this is a nice example of understanding some basics and how a vector database fits in âGiven a string, embedding models convert it to a vector that you can run a simple distance algorithm to find related ones or the ones that are similar to your query.â https://medium.com/@mustafaakin/indexing-icloud-photos-with-ai-using-llava-and-pgvector-fd58182febf6 The Basecamp Employee Handbook (120 minute read) Not enough companies have this. And I think it makes a huge difference to have something nicely looking instead of a cut&paste orgy in Notion. But perhaps thatâs just me. Also, of course: As a German always stunned by âHealth careâ under âPerks.â Go, pay a freelancer to write this for you, from the cut&paste of your Notion page. It creates a culture, creates alignment, improves onboarding and reduces friction. Developer Experience for the 99% (18 minute read) Youâre the 99% - act that way. Youâre not the 1% (unless you are ;-) https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/developer-experience/ AI poisoning could turn open models into destructive âsleeper agents,â says Anthropic (7 minute read) So an AI can play well and nice for some time, then at some time spit out code with backdoors. Never copy and paste without understanding what youâre pasting. But we are moving into a future where AI will change code and create code on its own. So how do we know if an LLM is a sleeper agent? Excellent feature.
You go on a bus ride,
and the website tells you to either sit left or right on the bus if you like the sun on your side or not.
This is something I call a WOW feature, or a deep feature.
Suppose you have a bus ticket website.
This feature is not crucial.
But itâs deep and will engage developers and motivate them,
working on real problems that need some thinking instead of âStore FORM A into TABLE Bâ ⌠*âproblems.â
It also makes the customer WOW, they are positively surprised and will praise your site.
But this is a feature most A/B and OKR driven product management teams will not come up with,
customers are not WOWed, developers are not challenged and will instead rewrite to Key findings from the 2023 State of Devops Report | Nathen Harvey (DORA at Google) (19 minute read) Worth the full read (or listen to). I consider DORA far from perfect, but itâs the best we have. https://getdx.com/podcast/findings-state-of-devops-report/ Forecasts need to have error bars (10 minute read) Forecasts and estimations are not measurements. Estimate how long my desk is, is much different from measuring how long my desk is. Measuring the temperature today is different from forecasting the temperature of tomorrow. And still, this is confused all the time. So Forecasts (and estimations) need error bars (or at least ranges). Forecasts in startups are slightly better treated than estimations, though they both try to predict the future. If you like mathematics, go read the article. https://andrewpwheeler.com/2023/11/19/forecasts-need-to-have-error-bars/ Sick leave Germany 2023: IT people are the least likely to call in sick in Germany [German] (3 minute read) I wonder why this is. Because technology invests more in people, has a better people culture (because we have talked about this for decades now). Or developers are more focused on tech? Tech good = devs happy? Or is it a fluke? Cursorless is alien magic from the future (7 minute read) Mind blown. âCursorless is a plugin that integrates with voice control software to let you do AST level code editing with your voice. This is crazy alien magic from the future.â This is tempting me from moving from Jetbrains Goland to VS. Example Idea: Address the
https://xeiaso.net/notes/cursorless-alien-magic/ Rewrites are Waterfall (2 minute read) I guess Iâm one of the few people who donât damn waterfallâpar se. Most B2B companies with direct customer contact and contracts for custom development should do more waterfall, requirement engineering, deadline managing, project management. And if you plan a rewrite, this is good advice. Rewrites for many reasons are Champions League Final Round. You need all the help you can get (Donât do them, and as CTO, if you want to do a rewrite, start within 3 months of you starting the new job) https://shermanonsoftware.com/2023/10/28/rewrites-are-waterfall/ Join the CTO newsletter! | |
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