🥬 Hiring Arc MiniCon! R&D Credits, Green Lumber Fallacy, Visualising Ops Work, QRF Teams, Toxic Behaviours, Calendar Blocking: TMW #262 by CTO Craft

Hello folks! Great to see you again

Those of you in the CTO Craft Slack community will already know that we've just announced the CTO Craft MiniCon on the Hiring Arc, on May 31st from 4 - 7pm UK time. The event will feature some amazing speakers like Jacob Kaplan-Moss (Jacobian), Roy Rapoport of Netflix, Jessica Zwaan of Whereby, Luca Rossi of Refactoring.fm and Laura Tacho of CloudBees and Codeship.

The number one issue our coaching clients and Mentoring Circle members have brought to the discussion over the last 6 months or so has been finding and securing great engineers, in a climate that's increasingly competitive and disrupted. We'll be walking through the entire Hiring Arc:

• Creating talent pipelines
• Alternative sourcing methods
• Hiring women and under-represented minorities
• The perfect job post
• Technical assessments
• Assessing culture fit and add
• Candidate experience modelling
• Structuring your offer: how to stand out from the crowd

This time around, we're inviting everyone to join us for free, so if you, like so many other CTOs, are struggling with your hiring process and would like to hear how some of the best leaders in the world do it, grab a ticket, and we'll see you there!

http://conference.ctocraft.com

Until we meet again

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft MiniCon - The Complete Engineer Hiring Arc in 3 Hours - free tickets!

Demand from start-ups through to corporates is outstripping supply and pushing wage inflation and candidate rejections. Join us on May 31st for 3 hours of in-depth insights from some of the world’s leading experts in Hiring Engineers, and learn how they’ve sustained successful team growth through COVID and the Great Rethink.

CTO Craft Bytes

A Tech Lead's guide to navigating R&D Tax Credits, Fri 22 Apr 2022 at 12:30pm BST

Understanding the processes involved, explaining what you’ve done and why it’s eligible for R&D Tax Credits, helps structure your approach to R&D not just through the application process but going into projects year-on-year.

Reads of the Week

Making operational work more visible

It’s 2019, back when I was on the CORE team at Netflix. I’m watching a teammate, the on-call site reliability engineer (SRE), investigate a spike in video playback errors reported by a number of smart TVs. The temporary spike lasted just a few minutes.

Taking a DevRel approach to developer onboarding

Maximizing developer community participation is a journey, not a destination. It requires continuously engaging with your community and making innovative changes along the way.

About our Partners

A huge, huge thanks to our partners for supporting CTO Craft in 2022 - you’re all amazing!

AWS, CircleCI, Code Climate, Karat, O’Reilly, Pentalog, Indiespring, Skiller Whale, The Software House, iTechArt, LinearB, Lohika, Albany Partners, 101 Ways, PGS Software, Steamhaus, 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

Engineering Org Structures - The QRF Team Model

As an engineering leader, I’ve found many products and engineering teams at startups struggle with being agile. The shortcuts the startup took early on getting to the point where they could grow had benefits, but also costs.

Motivating Developers to Care About Documentation

I like to dispel what I call the myths of documentation: “documentation is bureaucracy,” “documentation is a nice-to-have,” and “documentation takes too much time.” All of these are myths. Documentation, done well, helps the team move faster with less rework. If you want to scale, you need documentation, it’s not a nice-to-have. And if it takes too much time it’s because the process isn’t set up right.

5 Stages of Career Planning for a Tech Team

If you’re wondering how to write a career progression plan and what are the stages of career progression planning, this article will help you find the answers. This is the second part of the big topic on software engineer career progression, in which you’ll find:

Scaling Engineering Culture

If you’ve been in the industry for a while, there is a good chance that you’ve seen how culture can change significantly when team composition shifts — whether it’s a period of hypergrowth, a change in executive senior leadership or an acquisition.

Leadership & Self-management

6 Toxic Behaviors That Push People Away: How To Recognize Them In Yourself and Change Them

Whether your toxic behavior is a common occurrence, or once in a blue moon, it’s critical for your happiness and success that you are able to recognize when you’re behaving badly, and shift it when it emerges.

What is “professionalism” and why am I writing about it?

I’m starting a new series on professionalism. I’ve been wanting to write about this topic for some time, but it’s a tricky topic and I haven’t been able to completely map it out. I still don’t, so this is going to be different from some of my previous series.

Getting Middle Management to Lead Change Even When They're Not Convinced

You’ve been working on a change initiative for months, gone through acceptance planning in an effort to reduce your organization’s resistance to change, and rolled out the initial plan to middle managers.

Calendar Blocking 101: This Is How You Should Be Doing It

It’s Monday, the start of a brand new week, and you’re already dreading the jam-packed days to come. Between three meetings today, a deliverable due tomorrow, and responding to emails, you’re swamped.

The Evolutionary Leadership Profile

Great leadership makes the difference between success and failure. It determines whether you’ll have passionate, engaged people in your workplace. A great leadership profile helps you zero in on the characteristics that are needed for leaders to unlock success.

Agile, Engineering & Product

Green Lumber Fallacy in Software Engineering

“Green lumber” is a term used to describe freshly cut lumber. One of the most successful traders of green lumber, Joe Siegel, mistakenly thought that green lumber was lumber that had been painted green. Joe made a fortune trading green lumber without knowing what it was.

Building Infrastructure Platforms

Infrastructure Platform teams enable organisations to scale delivery by solving common product and non-functional requirements with resilient solutions. This allows other teams to focus on building their own things and releasing value for their users.

Design Patterns and Principles That Support Large Scale Systems

Today even small startups may have to work with terabytes of data or build services that support hundreds of thousands of events per minute (or even a second!). By “scale”, we usually refer to a large amount of requests/data/events that the system should handle in a short time period.

3 Metrics for Engineering Team Success Other Than Velocity

If you have worked in an Agile software development environment, you are probably familiar with the idea of measuring a team’s Velocity.

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:

https://techmanagerweekly.com

Have an amazing week!

Andy