Apr 4, 2022

🪁 Translating Tech Debt, Design Thinking, Tiger Hiring, Take-homes, Code Ownership, Breach Legal Costs: TMW #260 by CTO Craft

By Andy @ CTO Craft • Issue #260 • View online

Hello, welcome to the week!

A massive thanks to everyone who’s completed the CTO Craft Member Survey - we now have several hundred data points with which to iterate on our events, resources and community activities. Watch out for some new initiatives very shortly - you’ll hear about them first here in TMW and in Slack.

You’ll notice a theme in today’s stack of links; we’re taking a close look at the Hiring Arc, from sourcing to onboarding. If you have any thoughts or insights you’d like to share or would like to feature in upcoming TMW issues on this topic, please drop us a line!

On with the show - have a great week!

Andy @ CTO Craft

How to be a Tech Debt Translator - from the CTO Craft Blog

You’ve probably heard of ‘tech debt’ and how it can impact a company. However, have you ever tried to explain it to non-technical colleagues in basic terms? It’s important to your company, and it’s essential that other functions in the company understand its impact and even its existence!

ctocraft.com • Share

CTO Craft Bytes

How Design Thinking can solve your challenges: Fri 8 Apr at 12:30 GMT

For quite some time, design thinking has been perceived as a magic methodology to set yourself apart from competitors by focusing on your customer’s needs. Yet, innovation labs come and go – building in-house teams to focus on the future alongside running the day-to-day business has proven to be challenging.

www.eventbrite.co.uk • Share

Reads of the Week

Tech Hiring Report 2022

Learn where you stack up against other companies in this tight labor market and the latest tech hiring data and trends.

datapeople.io • Share

Prioritization is a Political Problem as Much as an Analytical Problem

Most of our tools and processes around product/feature prioritization are heads-down analytical: RICE, opportunity trees, Kano, weighted 16-column spreadsheets, WSJF, Eisenhower, whatever.

www.mironov.com • Share

About our Partners

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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

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Culture & People

The Tiger Hiring Algorithm

I’m going to try to do something hard: simplifying hiring down to a dead simple algorithm based on only four data-backed, high-signal attributes.

danielmiessler.com • Share

The Ultimate Guide to Onboarding Software Engineers

It’s Monday. You’re back at work after a nice weekend, feeling excited as the new engineer is joining your team today! She arrives, gets her laptop and first coffee, you have a nice chat about the weekend, then the question hits you: “So, what’s my first task?”.

leadership.garden • Share

How To Hire A Data Scientist

Running data science projects successfully is already quite challenging, and the first step is to hire some data scientists. Given the current market this is no easy task.

mikiobraun.wordpress.com • Share

How GitHub does take home technical interviews

There are many ways to evaluate an engineering candidate’s skills. One way is to ask them to solve a problem or write some code. We have been striving for a while to make this experience better at GitHub.

github.blog • Share

Dear Manager, You’re Holding Too Many Meetings

Where your work meets your life. See more from Ascend here. Meetings serve different purposes, ranging from informal social gatherings to formal brainstorming sessions. They often show up on our calendars as recurring events (with no end date in sight!).

hbr.org • Share

Leadership & Self-management

7 Mental Models For Great Engineering Leadership

A couple of weeks ago, I hosted a talk with Point Nine, where I presented what I believe are the essential building blocks of great engineering leadership.

athenian.com • Share

How Engineering Managers Fail

Engineering Managers (EMs) don’t intentionally set out to fail. Instead, they are often set up for failure. But even if they are set up for success, there are some common ways new Engineering Managers fail. This article will cover these and what to do instead.

www.patkua.com • Share

Startup Jobs: What’s it like being a Chief Technology Officer (CTO)?

At ease with experimentation, prototyping, & MVP development: Have you built something that had to be thrown away? Comfortable with ambiguity/constant change: How do you balance technical debt with the need to move quickly?

foundersfactory.com • Share

How to Alleviate Leadership Anxiety With the Power of Perspective

One of the most important functions of effective leadership is to master the power of perspective. Leaders require the ability to look at problems and determine their relative size and importance.

scottcochrane.com • Share

Agile, Engineering & Product

Code Ownership, Stewardship, or Free-for-all?

As the pendulum has swung from monoliths to micro-everythings - services, front-ends, you name it - we find ourselves with more “things” to build and maintain. And so it begs the question, who is responsible for what?

bennorthrop.com • Share

How to estimate legal costs from a data breach.

We need budget and headcount to mitigate risks. Larger risks should encourage more resources towards mitigation efforts. Legal costs are wild area of costs… along with costs to the business and regulatory risks.

magoo.medium.com • Share

The Agile Elephant and the agile mindset

Confession: I’ve been avoiding the words “agile mindset” for some time because I don’t know what it is. And, completely by coincidence, I’ve recently had a couple of encounters that have caused me to think again. So let me explain…

www.allankelly.net • Share

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