🤖 CTO Craft Conference, Impostors, Technical Assessments, Coordination Models, Tech Debt at Scale: TMW #235 by CTO Craft
Hello again!
As you'll have seen in the email last week, CTO Craft Con is live! We're still working on the line up, but what we can absolutely promise is four amazing days of talks and panels. Rather than a single theme for the whole event, each day will focus on a different leadership topic: Hiring, Learning and Development, Strategy and Burnout.
Early-bird prices are in effect, so jump in - remember to use this special lick to enable the Member ticket price. See you there!
CTO Craft Con Winter '21 - Early Bird Tickets
This week's Bytes event will look at a sad but universal truth - technology and engineering is rife with impostor syndrome. We'll be in conversation on Friday with our friends at The Software House as they dig into the phenomenon, where it comes from and how we can improve the situation.
That's it from me - onto the content! Until next time
Andy @ CTO Craft
CTO Craft Con - Winter 2021: Hiring, Learning and Development, Strategy and Burnout
Early-bird Tickets now on sale!
Join us for the 3rd CTO Craft Con held over four days from the 8th to 11th November 2021 between 4pm and 7pm UK time.
Packed with idea sharing, real life case studies, how tos, lessons learned, giving you hard earned knowledge, and experience from these leading technology and engineering minds.
CTO Craft Bytes
Does the tech industry suffer from mass Impostor Syndrome?
Every year, technologies, methods and tools change because nothing has yet matured to become a universal standard - so nothing is right, wrong, or according to “craft”. Truth is, a lot is guess work but, we’re just figuring things out, as any youngling does.
From our Partners
No-code workspaces built for migrating data
Take the pain out of importing messy customer data with Flatfile, the platform built to make data onboarding, effortless.
Why delivering a mobile-first digital transformation matters
Indiespring share their insights on why mobile development should be key focus at proposition stage in order to open up a world of innovation.
About our Partners
A huge, huge thanks to our partners for supporting CTO Craft in 2021 - you’re all amazing!
AWS, CircleCI, Karat, O’Reilly, Indiespring, Skiller Whale, The Software House, iTechArt, LinearB, PGS Software, 101 Ways, Albany Partners, Swarmia
🥝 🥝 If you’re interested in reaching thousands of senior technology leaders and decision makers, drop a reply to this email to see our Partnership Opportunities! 🥝 🥝
Culture & People
4 Ways To Effectively Mine for Emerging Leadership Talent
As a leader, nothing you do will ensure long-term success like finding and developing emerging leadership talent. Effective leaders are like gold-miners, always looking for the next “rising star” on the team.
Which type of pre-onsite technical interview is the best for recruiting engineers?
Like many engineers, I’ve had a career full of horrible interviewing experiences, both as a candidate and an interviewer. As a candidate, I’ve been told to write a distributed system implemented using mutexes on a whiteboard.
10 Things Your Corporate Culture Needs to Get Right
Knowing what elements of culture matter most to employees can help leaders foster engagement as they transition to a new reality that will include more remote and hybrid work.
Coordination models - tools for getting groups to work well together
As an organizational leader, you’ll be faced with many situations where you’ll need to define how people work together. Today, I’ll list some coordination models you can use to solve many of these situations. These models are very much like tools in a toolbox.
Leadership & Self-management
What’s the Best Thing a Manager Has Ever Done For You?
When Julie Zhuo asked over 120,000 twitter followers about the best thing their manager had ever done for them, she got over 500 responses.
The Ultimate Guide to Running Executive Meetings — 25 Tips from Top Startup Leaders
Frustrated with your Executive team meetings? We tapped 25 top leaders from the startup C-Suite to share their tested tips, from getting started with an executive team to crafting the agenda and tracking success. Whether you're a first-time CEO or seasoned startup leader, there are plenty of new ideas to try from folks at Superhuman, Lattice, Asana and more.
OKRs are networks, not hierarchies
If you use objective and key results (OKRs) as part of your practice you have probably struggled to make them fit together across the organization. Many groups use a simple hierarchy of OKRs so that they flow down, up, and meet in the middle to match the way that their organizations are set up.
People- vs Results-Oriented Management: Both Work!
Broadly speaking, there are two management styles: people-oriented and results-oriented. (This is, of course, a dramatic oversimplification. This is just one way of thinking about management styles that yields some interesting insights. All models are wrong; some are useful.)
Agile, Engineering & Product
How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum
Project management is a topic most people have strong opinions on, and I’m no exception. To answer the question of how different companies run engineering projects, I pulled in help from across the industry. In this issue we’ll cover:
Demos Over Deadlines
As an engineer, I served on many teams: some very efficient and functional, some less so. One predictive factor in the health of the development teams was time pressure. Too much time pressure inevitably led to burnout, poor morale, poor employee retention, and poor team performance.
From 15,000 database connections to under 100: DigitalOcean's tale of tech debt
I could not help but smile when I heard the question. Software engineers asking about a company’s tech debt is the equivalent of asking about a credit score. It’s their way of gauging a company’s questionable past and what baggage they’re carrying.
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:
http://www.techmanagerweekly.com
Have an amazing week!
Andy