If you only read one thing🛫 How Cargo Cult Thinking Nearly Derailed Our Startup (12 minute read) Gold. At it’s core it explains how new managers hired to become more professional had no clue “Our new team seemed to believe that as long as the technology was impressive, the market would follow” Like everyone else. And “This team adopted a “multi-pronged” strategy, simultaneously chasing multiple verticals without committing to any single focus.” Again like everyone else who doesn’t know what they are doing (no real vision and strategy). If you do more than one thing, you have no clue what you are doing. And more in the article. Event of the weekIs there a formula for high-performing P&D teams? My take: With the greaaaaaat Eric Bowman - CTO at King I always get something out of listening and talking to him. Would love to go there, but no longer in Berlin, now living at the sea 🌊 “Roundtable CTO Berlin” / 11. September 2024, Berlin https://www.meetup.com/de-DE/cto-roundtable-berlin/events/302999651/
Stories I’ve enjoyed this week💪 Why Motivation Always Follows Discipline (11 minute read) Sometimes I discuss with my client motivation and how important it is in developers. They ask me how to find out if someone they are going to hire is motivated. The article says motivation follows discipline—so look out for discipline in a candidate! #Protip I’ll add, motivation does not exist, it’s discipline and joy. So also look for joy. Candidates need the joy of work in some things, and discipline to do things they don’t enjoy. Easy what to ask a candidate in an interview if you know this. https://www.mikelavalley.com/sidenotes/why-motivation-always-follows-discipline The Sneaky Costs of Scaling Serverless (41 minute read) Ah yes, serverless. If you have the money, lots of it, go for it! (but the money might dry up, that series A might not be coming, have a plan B). What I found interesting here, “on Vercel ~1276 GB-Hrs per month on Vercel and ~101 GB-Hrs on AWS.” Same service. Same traffic. The billing of “serverless” looks random to me, with prices pulled out of thin air in a meeting with executives and dice. https://www.zachleat.com/web/serverless-cost/ ⛔ Stop ‘Manage by Exception’ (17 minute read) When I join a company as a manager like CTO, there often is chaos that I should fix. Then I add processes for most things, delegate, give authority, make people responsible, add the right engineering culture, make everyone hire great people, and I tell everyone when I see something that I like, some behaviour or code or ideas. Then everyone is surprised that I’m not stressed and overworked. Then there are people where chaos doesn’t go away. The reason? The love being a hero, so they need chaos. The need to manage by exception. “They intervene only when something big happens, overlooking smaller mishaps” Don’t. https://yanivpreiss.com/2024/08/11/stop-manage-by-exception/ 📅 Create Calendar Entries with Claude (34 minute read) OCRing an image, then creating calendar entries from the image. I feel like many #CTOs still are not at the forefront of AI usage but on a text prompting level. Level up! Study: Why laws are written in an incomprehensible style (13 minute read) Study says, normal people write laws in an incomprehensible style because they think laws need to read like this. How is this relevant to CTOs? Well, you write sterile job ads because you think they are written that way. Developers write incomprehensible architecture documentation, because they think they are written that way. DON’T Write for the reader, documents have a why, every document essentially needs to help people make a decision. Write it that way. https://phys.org/news/2024-08-laws-written-incomprehensible-style.html The Apostle Model (10 minute read) I always found this customer model very useful in explaining things. Customers are put into four quadrants, Hostages (not happy, will buy again), Loyalists (happy, will buy again), Mercenaries (happy and not loyal), Defectors (unhappy and not loyal). I often see startups where customers are locked into the product, but are unhappy. This is a very unstable situation like a compressed spring. One wrong company movement, or a better competitor and everyone is gone. Are most of your customers hostages? https://cx-journey.com/2012/02/apostle-model.html 🐛 An underrated software engineering interview question (7 minute read) “Here’s a repo you’ve never seen before. Here’s how to build and run the tests in this repo. There’s a bug: what we’re observing is X, but we want to see Y instead. Find the bug and maybe even write some code to fix it.” Really like that one, it stresses code reading, code understanding and fixing a bug. Not same l33t code questions. https://blog.jez.io/bugsquash/ 👥 Could this meeting have been an email? (10 minute read) Yes. ………………………………. Meetings are for alignment and decisions. 😮 Working with People Who Aren’t Self-Aware (15 minute read) Don’t. But, ha, it’s not always that easy. Sometimes you are forced to work with those people. I loved their list though. From the article, they
My take: If you have employees that have two of these signs, it’s time for them to go. You might be a better manager than me, there are many, but I never could turn someone around without self-awareness. And I inherited people that showed all six of those signs. https://hbr.org/2018/10/working-with-people-who-arent-self-aware Good Refactoring vs Bad Refactoring (28 minute read) CTOs do not talk enough about refactoring. Everyone things they know what it means. But everyone means something different. The article goes into detail on good and bad refactorings, this article would be great for a kickoff with your developers. My beef with refactorings: I love ongoing small refactorings. What I love most is Decompose conditional, https://refactoring.guru/decompose-conditional to But I digress. Often developers mean LAAAAARGE refactorings, when they talk about refactoring. Nothing could be more wrong, and you need to break it to them, that are not refactorings. Constant “small” refactorings keep your code flexible, testable and in shape. Read the book! https://www.builder.io/blog/good-vs-bad-refactoring My book:
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