🥒 Platform Eng KPIs, Oncall Compensation, Unhappy Developers, Friction, Containers, Reference Architectures: TMW #279 by CTO Craft
Howdy, welcome to the week!
We'd really love to hear from you if you have a topic you'd like to write a CTO Craft blog post on, or appear on one of our Bytes events to discuss - please do drop us a line if you'd like to collaborate! Also, we're always looking for leaders to interview for our Zero to CTO blog series, which focuses on the path from IC to leader. There are some great interviews already up on the blog - check them out
Hope you're having a great summer - reach out if there's anything we can help you with
Until next time
Andy @ CTO Craft
Reads of the Week
Platform Engineering KPIs
Platform as a product is becoming an increasingly popular approach to building internal platforms in engineering organisations.
Oncall Compensation for Software Engineers
This issue is the second part and final article in a series about oncall. Part 1 – published last week – covers healthy oncall practices. In this issue, we dive into: In this issue, we’ll go through more than 80 data points on how much different companies pay for oncall.
From our Sponsors
Are Unikernels Just Containers 2.0? - from NanoVMs
Learn how unikernels can run up to 200% faster on GCP, 300% faster on AWS while being easier than kubernetes.
About our Sponsors
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Culture & People
What to focus on when managing a growing team
Focus means not just saying “yes,” but saying “no” too. Say “yes” to these 3 things and “no” to these 3 things when managing a growing team. Coupling the words “managing a growing team” and “focus” may seem oxymoronic to you.
Why Now’s the Perfect Time to Retool Your Hiring Process and Get Creative
Whether hiring is slowing down or keeping pace, now's the time to revamp your process, from job description to offer. Peoplism's founders share unexpected tips, from swapping resumes for a screener survey, to sharing interview questions in advance.
What Makes Developers Unhappy?
This week I read the paper On the Unhappiness of Software Developers by Daniel Graziotin, Fabian Fagerholm, Xiaofeng Wang, and Pekka Abrahamsson. This was a large-scale survey study with over 2,000 developers that looked to understand happiness among developers and what the top causes of unhappiness are.
The Cognitive Load Theory in Software Development
“Our codebase is easy to understand. You won’t need more than a couple of hours. You’ll be productive right away! Guaranteed!” It’s Dave, your colleague developer, explaining to a new employee how one of the codebase of your company shines like a diamond.
Resolving Conflicts Between Designers And Engineers
In this article, Scott Himmer will go over some areas where you might find the design and engineering conflicts manifesting, what some of the contributing factors are, and strategies to work through the challenges.
Leadership & Self-management
Want to Communicate Effectively at Work? Eliminate These 5 Cognitive Distortions
In this article, I will cover five cognitive distortions that impact communication:
- Heaven’s reward fallacy
- Curse of knowledge
- Fundamental attribution error
- Fallacy of change
- Bikeshedding
Where Have All The Leaders Gone Redux: The Red Rise
One of my favourite social engineering experiments is a computer simulation showing how ghettos form. A simple model of housing markets in which digital sellers are programmed to have a preference for certain types of buyer.
Being an Under-represented Voice in the CTO Chair
Tramale Turner is the CTO of TaxBit. We met at the LeadDev LeadingEng conference in London. When I met him I thought I bet he has some great leadership stories for us. I invited him on the spot and am grateful he said yes.
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.
Evaluating Information: Find the Signal in the Noise
We are drowning in information. Most of that information is irrelevant. If only we could sort what matters from what doesn’t. The good news is that you can train your brain to evaluate the quality of information.
Agile, Engineering & Product
Why we have containers
One day a shiny new app was completed. All the code was just right, and it was ready to go out in the world and be useful! The app looked bashful. “Um, um, on a computer! I need a computer to run on!”
One Quick Way to Start to Manage Your Project Portfolio
The question: How can this portfolio team start to manage the project portfolio when the organization has 600 projects? Right now, the portfolio team is supposed to read the status decks for each of those 600, to understand each project's status. How to start?
Embedding Security into SDLC using Reference Architectures for developers
So you want your developers to build secure applications during SDLC and not as an afterthought after being dinged by Security reviewers. You got this idea of highlighting security controls via reference architectures that can be easily consumed by developers early on in the SDLC life cycle.
Talking About Sizing and Forecasting in Scrum
The Scrum world has changed a lot in the last few years. Nowhere is that more true than estimating; Scrum folks have struggled with the practice since the framework's origin. Other folks also struggle with it, but this article focuses on Scrum. Many don't see the value in estimating.
That’s it!
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Have an amazing week!
Andy