🍳 Conference! Scaling Culture, Destructive KPIs, Retaining Talent, Bad Interviewers, Wardley, Java: TMW #281 by CTO Craft
Hello there!
Yep, conference time is coming up again - we'll be live on November 14th - 16th, with our usual packed agenda of talks, panels and fireside chats. However, this time we're adding something new to the mix - an additional day which will be an Unconference, with lightning talks from community members, a Call for Thoughts, as well as extra networking and roundtables to join, focused on the engineering leadership role and experience.
We're keeping the content as broad as possible this time rather than having a specific theme, but we will be drilling deep into two particular areas of interest:
- Relationships with other C-level leaders and functions
- Building a network as an engineering leader
Speakers will be announced shortly, and early-bird tickets are on sale now, so jump in, and we'll see you in November! If you're a CTO Craft Community member, check #announcements for your exclusive member discount code
On with the links... See you next week
Andy @ CTO Craft
Announcing CTO Craft Con Winter 2022!
Over 2 days of conference sessions and a single-day Unconference packed with idea sharing, real life case studies, how-tos and lessons learned, CTO Craft Con will arm you with hard earned knowledge and experience from leading technology and engineering minds.
Speakers and agenda TBA shortly! Get your early-bird ticket now
Read of the Week
How to Manage Culture Change in the Workplace as Your Team Grows
Managing culture change in the workplace is challenging, especially in a growing company. As a leader, you have to investigate the existing problems, and you must solve them while establishing new practices, always keeping improvement in mind.
Rituals for Engineering Teams
Last weekend I happened to pick up a book called “Rituals For Work: 50 Ways To Create Engagement, Shared Purpose, And A Culture That Can Adapt To Change.” It’s a super quick read, more comic book than textbook, but I liked it.
About our Sponsors
Thanks as always to the amazing sponsors helping CTO Craft bring you resources like this newsletter, our events, community and more:
AWS, Albany Partners, Code Climate, Google Cloud, iTechArt, Jellyfish, LinearB, Lohika, 101 Ways, O’Reilly, PGS Software, Pentalog, Skiller Whale, Steamhaus, Swarmia, YLD
Culture & People
The Tech Strategy That Thrives in a Recession - from Skiller Whale
Build learning into your tech strategy to hit product milestones during a hiring freeze. Further detail on learning strategy in linked ebook.
KPIs, Velocity, and Other Destructive Metrics
The Deming quote at the top of this post is often twisted into something worthy of Frederick Taylor: "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it." Deming would disagree.
Why are Group Decision-making Techniques Important?
Whether we’re facilitating Retrospectives, Sprint Planning, or a Strategy session, there are always decisions needed. How you approach those decisions should vary depending on the degree of cost and whether the decision is easily reversible or not.
How to Retain Tech Talent Through the 6 Rules of Engagement
Purpose rule. People need to be using what they do best (talent) doing work they love (passion) to produce results that matter to them (mission). The tech worker, perhaps more than other professions, cares more about the actual work itself and the results of the work.
Full remote tech jobs pay better, Global Tech Talent Trends shows
The world has changed drastically in the last two years. Remote work went from nice-to-have to almost mandatory. Hiring and working across borders or relocating to another country are no longer exceptions but proven trends.
Leadership & Self-management
Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas
How do you come up with fresh, transformative ideas? Or the modern version, seventeen pointers flying around a Miro board, zooming to 2000% to read that auto-scaled-down text in each standard-sized virtual sticky-note.
Seven habits of bad interviewers
I’ve seen many bad interviews. Sometimes, only some questions are bad, but usually it goes further than that. Bizarre questions like “what’s the difference between a number and an array” are just a symptom of deeper issues.
How to Wardley Map
The practice of how to Wardley Map is difficult. Anyone who claims they are an expert mapper should be immediately discounted.
Reduce Friction
The topic of reducing friction exhausts me: Do people still need to be persuaded to help their developers go faster? Really? In this, the year 2022? But yes, in this, the year 2022, many teams require persuasion on this topic.
What to do when someone tells you to "take initiative"
I have always hated the phrase “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions!”. It feels lazy. It incentivizes people to sweep things under the rug if they can’t figure out what to do.
Agile, Engineering & Product
Live Your Best Life With Structured Events
If you’re like most of us, you learned to debug as a baby engineer by way of printf(3). By the time you were shipping code to production you had probably learned to instrument your code with a real metrics library.
Using GPT-3 to explain how code works
One of my favourite uses for the GPT-3 AI language model is generating explanations of how code works. It’s shockingly effective at this: its training set clearly include a vast amount of source code. Here are a few recent examples.
Django and OpenAPI: Front end the better way.
If you've ever written a front end in React, Vue, or whatever framework-du-jour happens to be popular in the current moment you've experienced this problem. You need to fetch some data—let's say a list of employees—from the backend and show it in your front end. And the tool you have is the API.
Don’t call it a comeback: Why Java is still champ
No matter what ranking system you look at, whether the TIOBE Index, the Popularity of Programming Language Index, RedMonk’s bi-annual language rankings, or GitHub’s yearly State of the Octoverse, Java has been sitting among the top three languages since shortly after its launch in 1995.
That’s it!
If you’d like to be considered for the free CTO Craft Community, fill in your details here, and we’ll be in touch!
https://ctocraft.com/community
Please do remember to share this link if you know of anyone who’d like to receive TMW:
Have an amazing week!
Andy