If you only read one thingSome mistakes I made as a new manager (17 minute read) āThe first thing I noticed about being a manager was that I wasnāt sure whether anything I was doing was useful.ā And then the article gets even better. I made so many of these mistakes myself. https://www.benkuhn.net/newmgr/ Tweet of the weekI know every one of you would like the $5 billion from Windows, but Gaming at Microsoft now has surpassed the Windows revenue. How times are changing.
https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1752452485116018704 š Graph of the week
From interviwing.io. Very relevant article - must read. Very interesting graph. And OUCH: āInterviewer confidence in the correctness of their assessments was high, with 72% saying they were confident in their hiring decisionā (Interviewees were told to cheat, interviewers didnāt know). https://interviewing.io/blog/how-hard-is-it-to-cheat-with-chatgpt-in-technical-interviews šļø Video of the week(Video) What do boards want from the CTO? (5 minute watch) One thing CTOs I coach struggle with: They feel like the alpha geek, not like an executive. This often rubs the CEO and is the base of a lot of friction. Very good video. https://www.linkedin.com/events/7137429756525907968/comments/
Stories Iāve enjoyed this weekAgile As a Micromanagement Tool (18 minute read) Amen. āAgile seems to devolve into a micromanagement tool, especially under clueless management who donāt have any proper technical background. [..] Agileās championing of the constant intermingling between business and engineering people usually results in the business people dominating the engineering folks.ā Engineers and CTOs need to get back control of what they are doing. https://muromuro.substack.com/p/agile-as-a-micromanagement-tool The end of 0% interest rates: what the new normal means for software engineers (11 minute read) Donāt know what ZIRP means? I didnāt either. Zero Interest Rate Policy. Article shows some alarming thoughts, like cloud, smartphone etc. happening in a ZIRP environment (Iād argue the internet didnāt). I especially liked the graphs from āHere is how job openings for developers have changed on the jobs aggregator, Indeed, and on Hacker News, where startups associated with startup incubator Y Combinator frequently hire fromā. Which rhymes with what I hear from my CTO coaching: Recruiting currently (if you have the money) is much easier compared to a year ago. https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/zirp-software-engineers Rethinking Team Metrics (12 minute read) āWhat it does not tell you is if the things they are completing are the right things, the most valuable things that will delight customersā https://visualstudiomagazine.com/Articles/2024/01/16/rethinking-team-metrics.aspx Is GenAIās Impact on Productivity Overblown? (4 minute read) No. Itās good to read the article though, which says yes. But ChatGPT currently writes really a lot of code for me (basically every function that does not need to know my complete codebase in detail). Then read, verify, add and let ChatGPT write some tests. Verification takes some time, and yes, it feels like ~20% of the time the solution does not work and more prompting doesnāt help. But overall, Iām much faster. But read the article with āthe likely long-term negative effects of using LLMs on employees and internal processes.ā https://hbr.org/2024/01/is-genais-impact-on-productivity-overblown After-sale strategies: Navigating the treacherous implementation stage (15 minute read) So many CTOs in B2B struggle with the onboarding phase of large customers. For many reasons. One reason is sales didnāt sell hard enough, accepted unrealistic deadlines and threw in to many goodies. This can only be solved with a change to sales commissions. No custom development = 100%, Light custom development = 75%, Heavy custom development = 50%. This makes sure sales works hard to sell the product without custom development. Otherwise, itās: the more custom development, the higher the bonus but the more effort for development. Or as my wife (sales expert!) says: Sales is not giving things away for free. My tip: Also use waterfall for custom development of large B2B customers with classical project management, itās just easier. The article is from a sales perspective, but it has some very good points. Why every developer should build a to-do list app (8 minute read) Good points on the benefit of building a todo app. My idea: Let every developer write a todo app in the first two weeks for onboarding (I was inspired by a coachee who lets developers work on a project for a month on their own, great idea you know who you are :-) The company can really judge their performance. Inside a team, they might be shadowed by team performance. So let the person write a todo app with the company frameworks, company tools, company PR/review, and deploy with the company pipeline. Easy to judge the new hire, and they learn about company technologies. There are benefits to let a new hire fix bugs starting their first day for onboarding, but I do think you can lean more if the hire was good with a todo app. No, really, try it! https://tatask.com/blog/why-every-developer-should-build-a-todo-app Lambda calculus explained through JavaScript: combinators and Church encoding (18 minute read) If you want some brain challenges, read this This has blown my mind of course. And was stimulating. Iāve struggled with the concepts since reading about the Y-combinator and
the Mockingbird book a long time ago. I love the Mockingbird combinator, a function that takes a function and
applies it to itself https://www.willtaylor.blog/combinators-and-church-encoding-in-javscript/ Why using a Now/Next/Later roadmap might be right for you (8 minute read) Iām not a fan of detailed feature roadmaps and deadlines. Iām a fan of vision and strategy. Now/Next/Later might do it though. Take a look if you struggle with roadmaps. https://elezea.com/2024/02/why-using-a-now-next-later-roadmap-might-be-right-for-you/ When should you give up on a project that doesnāt work? (6 minute read) What I take away from the article: Passion projects have similar cycle as new technologies for developers in your org. 1. Initial passion 2. Excuses 3. Fake productivity 4. Pushing tasks back by days 5. Giving up (== next technology). https://www.preethamrn.com/posts/when-should-you-give-up Google spent billions of dollars to lay people off (4 minute read) The coming AI layoff wave shows its face. Companies get ready when you see Google spending billions to reduce headcount āThe company spent another $700 million on layoffs just this month, even as it recorded growth across its ad, cloud, and services divisions.ā and there will be much less office space in the future āShutting down physical office space cost Google a total of $1.8 billion for the entirety of 2023.ā Join the CTO newsletter! | |
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