Sep 20, 2021 6 min read

🥐 Technical Assessment, Replatforming, Builder's High, Managing Change, Tough Leaders: TMW #234 by CTO Craft

Hey there! Welcome to the week

This Friday's Bytes session will cover developments in the Technical Assessment stage of the engineer interview process - we'll be joined by the founder of a startup aiming to standardise that, who'll be sharing insights from their research.

Don't worry if you've missed any previous Bytes or if you can't attend - recordings are available straight after the event on our Crowdcast page. That includes last week's session on Data Protection and GDPR, so if you didn't attend, now's your chance to get the inside track

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That's it - on with the show! Until next time

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Bytes

Technical Assessment - Fri 24 Sep 2021 at 12:30pm UK time

Building your team involves a constant race against your competition - top developers are scarce and often ‘hidden’’ amongst a bunch of CVs. Too many hoops can scare your best candidates away; too few and you’ll hire someone who will negatively impact your team's productivity.

Reads of the Week

“Get Off the Floor” and Other Career Advice from Microsoft, Looker, Reddit & Twitter

Nick Caldwell's resume includes an enviable list of companies — Microsoft, Reddit, Looker and Twitter. He shares his biggest lessons from each for a crash course in finding success across different company cultures, scales & functions.

The Builder’s High

When I am in a foul mood, I have a surefire way to improve my outlook – I build something. A foul mood is a stubborn beast and it does not give ground easily. It is an effort to simply get past the foulness in order to start building, but once the building has begun, the foul beast loses ground.

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Culture & People

Useful knowledge and improvisation

Eric Dobbs recently retold a story on twitter (a copy is on his wiki) about one of his former New Relic colleagues, Nicholas Valler. At the time, Nicholas was new to the company.

Top Five Ways to Create Psychological Safety

Everyone’s talking about the importance of psychological safety.

What I've Learned from the 16 Engineers who Turned Down Job Offers at Our Startup

I'm the cofounder and CEO of Kapwing, a 30-person company based in San Francisco. In our three years of trying to recruit top engineering talent, we've made 36 job offers to engineering candidates, and 16 of them turned us down.

What needs to change? That’s easy. How and when is the hard part.

Timing is everything. Most of us realize that whether it’s meeting that special someone, buying or selling an investment, or just picking the right job opportunity, timing matters. A lot.

Give your support team more input with this decision-making framework

Is your support team craving more involvement in decision making? There are lots of good reasons why you should try to involve your employees in decision making when possible.

Leadership & Self-management

The relationship between OKRs and strategy

A client I worked with earlier this year asked me to come in and help them establish objectives and key results (OKRs) for the entire product development organization — nearly 1500 people. I was thrilled. This was an organization anchored for decades in output-focused management techniques.

4 Ways You Can Immediately Become A Tough Leader Without Being a Jerk

You can be a tough leader without being a jerk. In fact, to be authentic, it’s a must. All too often, being a tough leader is confused with simply being a jerk.

Process Eats Culture for Breakfast

You can’t change organizations by implementing new processes alone, so the thinking goes, you have to foster a new culture in order to drive real change.

5 Reasons Your Employees Don’t Understand Your Company’s Vision

Leadership teams often spend hours wordsmithing their business’ vision, mission, and strategy, only to hear employees complain, “We don’t have a north star.

Agile, Engineering & Product

The Risks of Replatforming

IMHO the #1 source of failure is setting entirely wrong expectations. I typically hear this: “We’ll shift a majority of development effort onto our NextGen system, build a 100% plug-compatible replacement for LegacyTech by February 15th, and immediately migrate all customers to NextGen. That lets us minimize work on LegacyTech for the next few quarters and deploy all of Engineering onto NextGen right after launch.”

Magical thinking in almost every word.

What Engineers Really Think About Technical Debt - DZone Agile

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Have an amazing week!

Andy