đ Internal Documentation, Hiring for Additivity, Better Meetings, CTO Ergonomics, Thinking in Systems, Monitoring: TMW #310 by CTO Craft
Hello again! Welcome to the week
For those of you who couldn't come along to CTO Craft Con Winter 22, we've put together a little recap - have a look below!
Next up in the CTO Craft calendar is our Festive Social in London, happening this Friday, Dec 9th. We'd love to see you there - tickets are free, and it's going to be a blast. If you like a good pub quiz, do come along
Until next time
Andy @ CTO Craft
A Recap of CTO Craft Con Winter 2022
At our recent conference expert speakers discussed essential aspects of forming and maintaining relationships with C-level leaders and building your network as an Engineering Leader.
CTO Craft Bytes
CTO Craft Bytes - Festive Social! Fri 9 Dec 2022 at 18:00
What a year itâs been! The CTO Craft team would love to invite you to an evening of merriment and cheer as we all take a moment to celebrate 2022 with the CTO Craft community.
Venue: Hoxton Underbelly, 11 Hoxton Square, London
Reads of the Week
Investing in Internal Documentation: A Brick-by-Brick Guide for Startups
Itâs the middle of the night when the on-call engineer jolts awake as their phone flashes and chimes with a flurry of push notifications, text messages, and phone calls. The production server is down and theyâre responsible for getting it back up as fast as possible.
From our Sponsors
10 Metrics Every CTO Needs to Know eBook - from Code Climate
Find out which engineering metrics are most important for CTOs and engineering leaders, and see how they can be leveraged to improve team health and maximize business impact.
About our Sponsors
Thanks as always to the amazing sponsors helping CTO Craft bring you resources like this newsletter, our events, community and more:
AWS, Albany Partners, Code Climate, Google Cloud, iTechArt, Jellyfish, LinearB, Lohika, 101 Ways, OâReilly, PGS Software, Pentalog, Skiller Whale, Swarmia, YLD
Culture & People
Hiring For Additivity
When I first interviewed at Netflix, I noticed that by and large the folks I met had been at Netflix for a long time. It made me curious, so I asked the question, âhow do you think about the risk of echo chambers?â The answer, in short, was âadditivityâ.
We asked 250k UK candidates what they want from a new job in tech: Here's what they said
The last few years in tech have been a real rollercoaster. From the lows of layoffs at the start of COVID to the boomiest tech boom weâve seen in years, weâre now making our way through a tunnel of uncertainty.
You now need to do 15% better in technical interviews than you did at the start of 2022 (and the bar will keep rising).
One of the most useful pieces of data in the current climate is the ever-changing technical interview bar â throughout 2022, itâs gotten progressively harder to pass technical interviews, and itâs only going to keep getting harder⌠because employers are gaining more leverage in the market.
How to... have better meetings
Meetings should be a fascinating topic. They define our work (we spend 15% of work in meetings, and managers spend 50%!), and they account for an astonishingly large amount of corporate cost (there are 55 million meetings a day!) Yet we mostly hate them and we do surprisingly little to make them better.
How writing helps Doist's asynchronous setup soar
For remote, global teams, asynchronous communication is a givenâand learning how to master it is a must. Since its founding 11 years ago, Doist has been a remote-first asynchronous company.
Leadership & Self-management
Company, team, self.
Back when I was managing at Uber, I latched onto a thinking tool that I drilled into the teams I worked with: reach the right outcomes by prioritizing the company first, your team second, and yourself third.
CTO Ergonomics: Stop Shrugging!
Are you going through your day feeling like youâre not deciding how to spend your time but instead are pulled in different directions? We seem to miss the fact that tech leadership should include a fair amount of taking the lead. When you simply âgo with the flow,â you are not likely to perform your best work and achieve the most impact on your team.
âThinking in Systemsâ (Book Review)
âThinking in Systemsâ is a short but pretty dense book about systems thinking. Its author, the late Donella H. Meadows, was an environmental scientist who back in the Seventies started applying the then relatively new tools of system thinking to global problems.
The Angelâs in the Details
What late people donât understand about us on-time people is that we hate you. And the reason why we hate you is that itâs so easy to be on time â you just have to be early. And early lasts for hours. And on time lasts a second. And then youâre late forever.
How the VP of Engineering at Glitch plans and prioritizes work for a 40 person software team without stifling creativity
As an engineering organization grows, one of the biggest challenges is managing and prioritizing the backlog. Planning is essential, as you need to agree on deadlines to align with internal and external stakeholders and to have a way to ensure that everyone is pulling in the right direction.
What are Healthy Relationships?
Five years into my career, I had gone from being one of the few engineers at the company, to being the expert on a medium-sized engineering team. If someone misunderstood how something worked, I could list all the ways there were wrong.
Agile, Engineering & Product
Writing User Stories and building successful products
Knowing the real needs of users and developing features consistent with this reality are key factors in building successful products.
Why most monitoring strategies fail
âWith enough eyes, all bugs are shallowâ âWith enough observability, all outages are transientâ Introduction A team without proven observability and on-call strategies will invariably suffer from reactive disruptions; mitigating outages will be painful, like finding a needle in a haystack w
Expensive Mistake That Often Plagues Layered Architectures
A quick Google search tells me that pretty much everyone defines the service layer a bit differently. Itâs likely that everyone reading this article also would define it a bit differently.
Thatâs it!
If youâd like to be considered for the free CTO Craft Community, fill in your details here, and weâll be in touch!
https://ctocraft.com/community
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Have an amazing week!
Andy