Amazing CTO | More happiness and success
🚀 Issue 7.1

by Stephan Schmidt

Happy Friday,

this weeks insights include

• ⛅ the CTO Job Market Weather Report
• Be less technical!
• What is a good remote job? 🏡
• Book recommendation 📚: “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek

Good reading, nice weekend ❤️ and until next week,

Stephan

⛅ CTO Job Market Weather

How is the CTO job market? I’ve taken a look at Indeed to find out, how many CTOs are there on Indeed.

I found 101 CTO jobs for the US, with 16 explicitly marked as remote. I found 40 for Germany. So if you are on the lookout for a new job, there seem to be plenty.

Stories I’ve encountered last week

Data salaries at FAANG companies in 2022

I’m a proponent of open salaries and I think governments will make this mandatory in the next years. Until then, every insight into salaries is valuable. Many of you are looking for data engineers, with remote work, this is with what you might need to compete.

https://medium.com/@mikldd/data-salaries-at-faang-companies-in-2022-29d5b56b2428

Who moved my 99th percentile latency?

This article goes into longtail latencies and argues you need to manage the 99th percentile, because it has more impact than you think.

https://engineering.linkedin.com/performance/who-moved-my-99th-percentile-latency

How DALL-E 2 Actually Works

DALL-E 2s AI to generate picture still fascinates, see what AI can do NOW (and how so go and amaze your CEO 😊

https://www.assemblyai.com/blog/how-dall-e-2-actually-works/

Making the world’s fastest website, and other mistakes

Fast is beautiful. We swing back from SPAs towards faster code. The Amazon homepage is fast. When fast becomes a value again, technology’s impact will be more appreciated which should help you as CTO. Go fast!

https://dev.to/tigt/making-the-worlds-fastest-website-and-other-mistakes-56na

Responsible Tech Playbook

“The playbook is a free PDF download of about 50 slides, the bulk of which is a summary of a dozen tools and methods that teams can use to better understand their responsibilities”

https://martinfowler.com/articles/2021-responsible-tech-playbook.html

How to run end-to-end tests 10x faster with firecracker

I didn’t know firecracker. Getting developers to write and run tests is sometimes a challenge. One reason is the setup these tests. Firecracker is used by AWS Lambda to freeze VMs. This can be used for faster fire up of test environments.

https://webapp.io/blog/github-actions-10x-faster-with-firecracker/

Don’t build useless features

How do you speed up development and get the CEO of your back? My first advice is to not build useless features (build deep features with impact instead). Someone agrees

https://staysaasy.com/product/2022/04/16/battlefield-product-management-dont-build-useless-features.html

How to spot great remote jobs: The Joel test for remote work

Remember Joel on Software and the Joel test? No? Doesn’t matter. Here we find “10 questions to assess the quality of a remote job”. Offering remote jobs is no longer enough, offering great remote jobs is the game now.

https://andreschweighofer.com/career/how-to-spot-great-remote-jobs-the-joel-test-for-remote-work/

Be less technical

The article is about developers, but the number one success factor for CTOs from my perspective: Be less technical!

https://www.sequential.dev/posts/be-less-technical/

Book of the week

This weeks book is “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek. Too many managers explain the what and how, not too many explain the Why. Giving sense to employees is key though. As a manager you have to be the new shaman, explain the world by telling stories around the why. In everything I do, from new projects to code quality I explain the why. Do you? If not, this book is for you. Order and read now.