If you only read one thingA company without offices (1986) (27 minute read) In the 60s, a woman hit the glass ceiling, Stephanie Shirley, and founded a company for remote programmers. In the 60s! Hiring only/mostly women that were trained but couldnât make a career at IBM, she grew very successfully. I wonder how to code remotely in the 60s and paper, I assume some letters (Imagine!). She had lots of insights in the 70s about remote work, things we relearn today. I could learn so much from talking to her. Amazing woman. (Sorry for the long translate-URL, couldnât find an English version, for transparency not shortened) CTO Job MarketWeekly 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, advisor, associate, audit Image of the week
From: https://taylor.town/10-minutes
Stories Iâve enjoyed this weekđ¤ Claude 3 claims it's conscious â LessWrong (9 minute read) Uh. Oh. Ah. Must Read https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pc8uP4S9rDoNpwJDZ/claude-3-claims-it-s-conscious Apple is in its Ballmer era (5 minute read) BAM. Another insight from #DHH. I totally agree with the Balmer Nadella transition. After Steve died, Apple lost its customer focus - and developer focus (yes, including M3!). I switched to Windows (WSL+Goland) some years ago after 20 years of Apple as my main computer (G4 cube, MacBooks, iMac Pro). I felt the same as #DHH. Hopefully Apple gets rid of Cook and finds itâs Nadella. Then Iâll be back. Is this always the case? Is the second in command, always good at something, like supply chains, and then makes the company more money when they get promoted, because they can optimize things to the max (Jobs->Cook, Gates->Ballmer), that they are good at, but at the same time break the company? Who will replace you? Are they good at the same things you are good at? https://world.hey.com/dhh/apple-is-in-its-ballmer-era-339b0713 LinkedIn Developer Productivity and Happiness Framework (3 minute read) Happy that more and more people talk about developer experience and developer happiness. https://linkedin.github.io/dph-framework/ The Rise of the AI Product Manager (10 minute read) âIt is time for the AI Product Managerâ The battle for AI has begun, who owns it? Tech or Product? If youâre a CPTO youâre lucky, no battle there. Otherwise, again, product snatched away all creativity, donât let product snatch away AI. âWith the prevalence of easy-to-access and easy-to-understand models (think GPT), there is an opportunity for PMs to cut a new path.â From my experience with many product managers (and Iâve met excellent ones, creative, visionary, development aware, great team players!) most are not good at requirements engineering, they want to draw up nice looking UIs in Figma. So, you have an advantage, donât squander it. https://world.hey.com/haws/the-rise-of-the-ai-product-manager-a44ec3e0 Mamas, donât let your babies grow up to be coders, Jensen Huang warns (9 minute read) Sadly yes. Developer at heart, writing code each day, but this will come to an end. Although itâs not clear to me, who will manage the AIs, who will do the prompting. It looks like you need to be a good analyst thinking of edge cases,and juggle models with boxes in your head, which would give developers the edge, and rather remove business analysts and product managers from the equation, instead of coders. We once gave a visual rule engine to product managers to replace developers that wrote the rules in code. End result, product managers couldnât think of the complexity of edge cases and interference, and developers ended up creating rules with a much less efficient visual rule engine compared to code. https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/27/jensen_huang_coders/ Stick to boring architecture for as long as possible. (9 minute read) Yes stick as long to a boring architecture as possible. Add complexity only when needed, not as a look into the future. I have many reasons why developers add too much unnecessary technology, didnât think of âFOMO can be a driving force behind our choicesâ. This reminds me of an article my Joel Spolsky decades ago where he said donât hire people (organisational complexity) before you have needed them for some time. https://addyo.substack.com/p/stick-to-boring-architecture-for đ§ Genie: Generative Interactive Environments (4 minute read) AI creating video games from a text prompt. Iâve started my career as a kid writing video games. Oh, my. https://sites.google.com/view/genie-2024/home AIs ranked by IQ; AI passes 100 IQ for first time, with release of Claude-3 (0 minute read) Feeding an IQ test into an AI (ha, intelligence! Since studying neuro-computerscience, it was clear people have no clue what intelligence is) The progress is amazing. Claude 3 has an IQ of 101 (GPT4 85), Claude 2 had 82, and Claude 1 had 64. https://www.maximumtruth.org/p/ais-ranked-by-iq-ai-passes-100-iq Germany confirms leak of Bundeswehr Ukraine war talks (4 minute read) A high-security call of the German military was leaked to Russia. And the secretary of defence said âuser errorâ is the reason, because the user was on a WebEx call unencrypted from a Hotel in Singapore. Systems like these need to be user error proof. And you are responsible to make sure people understand this, down to the private. Whenever one of your reports tells you âuser errorâ for a crisis like this, fire on the spot. Blaming culture is bad. Blaming their mistake on someone else is even worse. https://www.dw.com/en/germany-confirms-leak-of-bundeswehr-ukraine-war-talks/a-68424687 Product engineer vs software engineer: whatâs the difference? (7 minute read) Havenât heard the term, but love it. âProduct engineers [..] own the product, and are responsible for its successes and failures.â Developers should own the product. Rename all your engineers now. Bonus point: Youâre tied to product and revenue and things will get much easier with the CEO. https://posthog.com/blog/product-engineer-vs-software-engineer How can I stop overthinking everything? A clinical psychologist offers solutions (12 minute read) Are you overthinking? I have quite often in the past. And this is not paralysis through analysis, but a deeper psychological problem. âA stressed out and tired brain will be more likely to overthink, leading to more stress and creating a cycle that can affect your wellbeing.â See how things lead to things? Donât overthink. Read the article. âHelp, I see a problem and no one is prioritizing it!â (9 minute read) âFirst, Iâd like to say that pointing out a problem is not sufficient to getting [sic] it prioritized. Itâs likely your manager was already aware of these problems already. Sheâs the manager of your team, after all. Whatâs the new information you provided to her? Instead, whatâs helpful is to remind her of the problem and then add your perspective on what the impact of it is.â Whatever you do, always look at a situation from the othersâ perspective. What is in there for them? Writing a job ad? Think about the candidates. Writing an architecture document? Think about the readers. Donât push information, ask yourself, what does the other want? Lots of good points in the article. https://ntietz.com/blog/advice-if-problem-not-prioritized/ Sexism in the City: âNo matter how hard I work, they will never ever recognise meâ (10 minute read) What can you take away from this? First, of course, donât be that boss. It Should be obvious in 2024, sadly isnât. Second, working hard does not make you successful (same with we build it, and they will come). Relationships, personal-branding and self marketing will get you promoted. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland Designates Jonathan Mayer to Serve as the Justice Departmentâs First Chief Science and Technology Advisor and Chief AI Officer (6 minute read) Heard the term âChief AI Officerâ here first. Should you work on changing your title? How high is the risk your CEO hires a CAIO? Youâve already lost product to the VP of product, donât lose AI! Streaming HTML out of order without JavaScript (8 minute read) Game changer for server side HTML. You now can render HTML with slots and later in the page fill those slots. No Javascript but a declarative ShadowDom. With HTML streaming, you can send the page, and async load data from different sources. Send when youâre done. Just like with AJAXâor Facebook BigPipeâbut without the complexity of Javascript. The pendulum is swinging back fast. https://lamplightdev.com/blog/2024/01/10/streaming-html-out-of-order-without-javascript/ If Youâre So Successful, Why Are You Still Working 70 Hours a Week? (5 minute read) Yes, why are you? To me working 70-hour weeks is a failure, you didnât hire the right team, donât give ownership, canât delegate. https://hbr.org/2018/02/if-youre-so-successful-why-are-you-still-working-70-hours-a-week Overwhelmed? Just Say âNo.â (10 minute read) âNo.â https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/saying-no-science-happiness/677579/ The Checklist for Deploying a Scary Change (5 minute read) I find too many startups release scary changes (they are not scared!) too easily. Part of being CTO is taking a professional stand and if it takes a month preparation to roll out a scary change, if it needs testing, it needs a dry run, then do it, whatever pressure you might get. Be a professional. The article is a little thin, but âIdentify Post-Deployment Indicatorsâ is something many developers miss. How do you detect a failure? https://deploybot.com/blog/the-checklist-for-deploying-a-scary-change All you need is Wide Events, not âMetrics, Logs and Tracesâ (15 minute read) Deep dive into observabilityâhow wide events help. And as most of my clients donât have enough of it, I guess you donât have enough of it. https://isburmistrov.substack.com/p/all-you-need-is-wide-events-not-metrics Join the CTO newsletter! | |
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