🐣 Interview Questions, Rebuilding Platforms, Hybrid Working, Apprentices, Sprint Planning, Pull Requests: TMW #209 by CTO Craft

Howdy!

We'll be restarting our weekly CTO Craft Bytes events this Friday, with a panel discussion with Fabio Oliveira of YLD and Jonathan Midgley of NewDay moderated by Glyn Roberts on the topic of application rebuilds. They'll be bringing experience from a number of bottom-up builds, and will discuss the pros and cons, the dos and don'ts and much more. There are already 85 people signed up to join us - hopefully see you there as well!

📆 CTO Craft Bytes - Rebuilding a Platform - Fri April 9th, 12:30 GMT

See you next time!

Andy @ CTO Craft

Reads of the Week

Unpacking Interview Questions

Andy says: "An amazing compendium of interview approaches and questions for engineers; if you're in need of inspiration, have a look here"

A series sharing some of the questions I use when I interview for technical roles. I’ll unpack the question, when to ask it, and how to evaluate answers.

Instagram Co-founder Mike Krieger on engineering team growth

By any measure, Instagram’s major milestones are staggering. The entire startup ecosystem sat up and took notice when Facebook acquired it for $1B only a year and a half after its founding.

About our Partners

A huge, huge thanks to our partners for supporting CTO Craft in 2021 - you’re all amazing!

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Culture & People

10 Stage Guide to Planning Your Return

With the prospect of the return to offices now just weeks away many firms are going through identical processes of trying to work out what they should do when it comes to using their workplaces.

Should they return to offices full-time? Should they try to adapt to the changing expectations of workers? Beneath a lot of the thinking is a sense of fear, what happens if things go wrong, can we put the toothpaste back in the tube?

Supporting Apprentices as an Engineering Leader

As an engineering leader with 15+ years of industry experience, I am currently head of engineering for the Marketing Technology Platform at Airbnb. Our goal is to build world-class technology systems and tools that power the unique blend of performance and brand marketing strategies at Airbnb.

Understand Better What Motivates Your Team

What motivates you to get up every day and go to work? Why do you what you do? Do you like it? Do you feel you have no other choice? Are you comfortable? As a manager, you work with your motivation and with the motivation of your team. It is difficult to make other people happy.

Neurology of Meetings

Have you ever thought about how brain chemistry affects your workplace and performance across your teams? Of course the way our minds work impacts our effectiveness and ability to work with others. How could it not? Everyone’s brain is different.

Leadership & Self-management

Lead from the Future

There is present-forward vision, and there is future-back vision. There is a difference. Present-forward thinking will get you incremental change and often leaves you stuck in the present. Future-back thinking expands your horizon to see opportunities that are beyond your core business.

What Information Do You Need in Order to Change?

“Feedback is an effective tool for promoting efficient behavior: it enhances individuals’ awareness of choice consequences in complex settings.”

We all want to improve at something. Skills we’d like to develop, habits we like to change, relationships we’d like to improve—there are lots of areas where we’d love to see positive, meaningful change.

Chaos Theory and Management: Learning from Systems in Nature

Does your team have enough freedom to make independent decisions and learn from failure? Are rigid rules at your company limiting your people’s creativity? Creativity and experimentation are crucial for innovating and developing problem-solving skills.

Becoming A Manager In 2021

If you’re stepping into a new management role this year, you’re probably going to have to get to know your team—and begin managing—remotely. Here are resources and tools for supporting your teammates as individuals, and as a unit!

Agile, Engineering & Product

Should a Team Assign Work During Sprint Planning?

When I was young, my mom taught me to tie my shoes. I no longer remember the exact steps, but it had to do with bunny ears. Since then I’ve learned there are many different ways to tie my shoes, many of which are better.

The Engineer’s Complete Guide to Improving Velocity

Speed is a crucial ingredient to all companies, especially startups. The defining characteristic of startups that end up making it against the odds, is their ability to move fast. So what does speed mean for engineering teams? Velocity.

Those pesky pull request reviews

They’re everywhere. In Slack: “hey, can I get a review on this?” In email: “Your review is requested!” In JIRA: “8 user stories In-Progress” (but code-complete). In your repository: 5 open pull requests. They’re slowing your delivery. They’re interrupting your developers.

Measures of engineering impact.

My engineering leadership circle met yesterday, and like usual, we talked about our current challenges before segueing into a deeper discussion. This time, Jack Danger brought up the challenge of measuring engineering impact, which is a fascinating topic that most engineering leaders have to tackle.

How We Enable Airbnb Team Members to Code Like a Mobile Engineer

As part of the TechEd team, our team’s goal is to enable our technical talent through continuous learning programs. One of the most common programs we work on is new employee onboarding for Engineering and Data Science teams.

What Else?

Asian Americans in tech say they face ‘a unique flavor of oppression’

Going unheard. Getting passed over for promotions. Stereotyped as "passive" and "diligent." Those are common threads in the experiences of the many Asian Americans working in tech who spoke to Protocol in recent days as the #stopasianhate movement swelled into nationwide protests and action.

Young, deported, and learning to code

The United States is deporting highly educated migrants, and offshoring companies have pounced at the opportunity.

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