If you only read one thingHow to hire low experience, high potential people (8 minute read) Many many many many good insights on hiring people with potential. Something I tell coachees also all the time: “Try to separate their actions from those of their team or the circumstance.” Some people made the coffee in that billion-dollar-migration project, but put the project in their CV. But again, many many more good insights in this article. https://worktopia.substack.com/p/how-to-hire-low-experience-high-potential Quote of the week“And here’s the interesting bit: I’m pretty sure I could have not done this at an “actual job”. I don’t have many jobs to compare, but e.g. at Unity between around 2015 and 2022, I think I would have been able to do like 30% of the above in the same time. Maybe less” Makes you wonder. https://aras-p.info/blog/2024/02/06/I-accidentally-Blender-VSE/ CTO Job MarketWeekly search on the open positions for CTOs in the US, Germany and the UK. So you can find out if it's 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, advisor, associate, audit Tweet of the week“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”
https://twitter.com/garrynewman/status/1755851884047303012 Graph of the weekIs there a new wave or not?
Stories I’ve enjoyed this weekNet Dollar Retention For SaaS Developers (4 minute read) As a CTO, you need to get tied to revenue, and become a profit center. Don’t default to being a “valued” cost center. And retention is the easiest way to tie you to revenue. e.g. first 6 months revenue is affiliated with marketing, revenue from older customers is affiliated with product and tech. Create a narrative that ties technology (and product) to revenue, and everything gets easier. https://shermanonsoftware.com/2024/02/06/net-dollar-retention-for-saas-developers/ Ten Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer (10 minute read) Very good points. I might add: Everything is negotiable, especially more than you think. In the beginning of my career I took every contract, then I negotiated and was told we can’t do this. When I saw other contracts, I’ve learned “We can’t do this” is not true, everything can be negotiated. And the sweet spot is: They love you, need you urgently, cleaned their hiring pipeline for the job and just right before you are signing. Then you have the highest lever. You sign and your negotiating power goes to zero - or 0️⃣ how people would say today. https://haseebq.com/my-ten-rules-for-negotiating-a-job-offer/ Microsoft: Study Proves Investing in ‘DevEx’ Pays Off (9 minute read) “Our findings are clear – improving and measuring developer experience is worth the effort [..] It will lead to happier and more productive developers, stronger teams, and more successful organizations.” https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2024/01/23/devex-research.aspx [Video] Transitioning from engineer to CTO (32 minute watch) Again from the brilliant Adelina Chalmers. This transition is often hard, from dealing with code to dealing with people. https://www.linkedin.com/events/7138885135243829248/comments/ The Management Team (10 minute read) First of all, Joel Spolsky. On of the most impactful writers about software engineering ten years ago. Now forgotten. We don’t know our history or our heroes in software engineering. “Today’s guest blogger needs no introduction.” Ah 2012. Lost as I’ve said. “This is my view of management as administration—as a service corps that helps the talented individuals that build and sell products do their jobs better.” Me too. https://avc.com/2012/02/the-management-team-guest-post-from-joel-spolsky/ Cloud Data Egress Costs (3 minute read) From free (Scaleway), to cheap (Hetzner, $1.07/TB), over expensive (Amazon, $92.16/TB) to the unbelievable (Netlify, $550.00/TB). The costs are not in compute but in egress. If you want to make your AWS bill cheaper, look here first. https://getdeploying.com/reference/data-egress The Scarcity of the Long-Term (5 minute read) Not about technology, but an interesting read. Exactly this is happening all the time when founders leave a startup: “It is much easier to build a rocket that will sail 500 years to the nearest star, then it is to ensure that the future generations of people born on board that 500-year rocket maintain the mission. It is very likely that before it reaches the 250-year halfway point, that the people on board turn it around and head back to a certain future. They did not sign up for this crazy idea!” Founders left, vision gone. https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-scarcity-of-the-long-term/ Tech Coops list (22 minute read) Perhaps your new job? “Tech cooperatives could be a solution if you feel alienated by big software corporations and startup culture or you feel alone and in search of solidarity as a freelancer.” We wanted to found a cooperative for consulting in the mid 1990s, but then only tree people were left out of 20+ (from an IRC channel), and then we founded a startup instead. Which ended as the first Wiki–>HTML render engine in Atlassian Confluence. But that’s another story. Should have powered through with the cooperative. It Can Be Done (2 minute read) From the years when engineers did great and amazing things instead of storing a form value into a database. “Finally André took his neat final pencil copy to a terminal and typed the whole program in. His first compilation attempt failed; he corrected three typos, tried again, and the code compiled. We bound it into the system and tried it out, and it worked the first time.” I work hard on getting us back into that time, when software engineers created amazing things. https://multicians.org/andre.html Bitwise 📼 Liminal (5 minute read or watch - both) This film is an engineering marvel. It’s 256 bytes. A film in 256 bytes. Like these 256 bytes: (In case you’re wondering if I typed this up: https://killedbyapixel.github.io/TinyCode/256B/BitwiseLiminal/ Fury Driven Development (20 minute read) If you want to read something angry, emotional, this is for you. From a developer perspective: “A scrumlord (TM), the very one that raised this issue, says: ‘Please don’t spend too much time on this.’ [..] Then why did you bring this up?” You want higher productivity of developers? The first step is to focus and stop defocusing them. https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/fury-driven-development/ (Almost) Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years running infrastructure at a startup (23 minute read) I agree with many and disagree with many of the points. But it is insightful, and I wish more people would write up their experience in this way. This one: “Datadog is a great product, but it’s expensive. More than just expensive” - I’ve made that experience too. Especially with spikes. But their support is great, and they have no problem waving away $50.000 in invoices—which makes them expensive but cool. The ideal PR is 50 lines long (7 minute read) Now you know. Let developers know. https://graphite.dev/blog/the-ideal-pr-is-50-lines-long The Architecture No One Needs (7 minute read) You’ve heard it here before, SPAs with React are complicated and expensive. Don’t do them. I put that one here as a reminder. https://www.gregnavis.com/articles/the-architecture-no-one-needs.html Decades of research destroyed after freezer fails at Swedish university (5 minute read) They let it sound like destiny, while it’s just bad engineering, monitoring and alerting. “[..] there was an interruption in the supply of liquid nitrogen to 16 cryogenic tanks, and while the tanks can go for four days without additional liquid nitrogen, they were left without it for five”*. Second nitrogen source? Alerting? Other backup systems? Lost the work of 30 years. I hope for your company you have a better backup system in place. Also my theory again: Disaster strikes when two problems collide. OKRs are Bullshit (14 minute read) My biggest problem with OKRs is, most of them are situational, opportunity driven and not derived from a strategy. Most of them are not company changing or binary, but if they are part of a path to a vision, they need to be. If you want to climb Mount Everest, you need to go through the base camp. Reaching 70% of the base camp is not getting you on top of that mountain. “And yet, my prediction is that every single manager in existence, as soon as they hear ‘OKR’ will immediately think ‘spreadsheet’. And I think that’s a problem too.” https://blog.appliedcomputing.io/p/okrs-are-bullshit [Video] Big projects are ditching TypeScript… wtf? (3:37 minute watch) The end? (I snuck in a second video! Or is this the third? ;-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ChkQKUzDCs Deepfake scammer walks off with $25 million in first-of-its-kind AI heist (5 minute read) “The scam featured a digitally recreated version of the company’s chief financial officer, along with other employees, who appeared in a video conference call instructing an employee to transfer funds.” I think many of you would like to have this to not needing to attend video calls ;-) Seriously, put this into your 30min security awareness training during onboarding (you have 30min of security awareness training during onboarding, don’t you?). And have proper processes. Top workers are more likely to want to quit when companies have strict return-to-office mandates (8 minute read) First this shows that people who do hard work want to stay more at home, not those to avoid work. “Research from Gartner indicates that high-performing workers are 16% less inclined to stay in their jobs when employers roll out strict return-to-office mandates.” Second, there is an opportunity for everyone else. https://www.businessinsider.com/strict-return-to-office-mandates-could-drive-away-top-workers-2024-2 Chat is minimum-viable anything (7 minute read) Interesting idea: “Two or more people together in a group chat room; that’s a minimum-viable community. A few drivers together in a group chat; that’s a minimum-viable ride-sharing platform. One person together with an LLM in a chat interface; that’s a minimum-viable AI assistant.” Join the CTO newsletter! | |
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