🌽 Tech Layoffs, Dissonance, Cash-Strapped Hiring, Inclusive Job Ads, Shipping to Production, Negative Engineering: TMW #269 by CTO Craft

Hello there!

Just a quick note to thank all the speakers, our sponsors, the CTO Craft Creative Committee and the whole CTO Craft team for helping make last week's MiniCon on the Hiring Arc an incredible success. There were over 1050 attendees, and the recording is already available on Crowdcast if you'd like to take a look:

https://www.crowdcast.io/e/ctocraftminicon2022

We're already hard at work on the next conference, which will happen in November... Watch this space!

On with the links - see you next time

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Bytes

CTO Fundamentals - The Ideal CTO, Fri 10 Jun 2022 at 12:30 BST

What makes a CTO more successful than others? Is it down to skill or is there a universal mindset agnostic to the development stage of the organisation? Or guiding maturity models? Are there any bulletproof principles that work for every company?

Reads of the Week

Your Head Hurts. But Why?

In my experience, people are generally good at sensing dissonance. They may not know the exact cause of that dissonance—and they might not actually care—but they sense something isn't adding up. A leader makes a statement to her team. The statement is 90% truth, and 10% success theater.

Everything you need to know about tech layoffs and hiring slowdowns

High-flying startups with record valuations, huge hiring goals and ambitious expansion plans are now announcing hiring slowdowns, freezes and in some cases widespread layoffs. It’s the dot-com bust all over again — this time, without the cute sock puppet and in the midst of a global pandemic we just can’t seem to shake.

About our Partners

A huge, huge thanks to our partners for supporting CTO Craft in 2022 - you’re all amazing!

AWS, CircleCI, Code Climate, Karat, O’Reilly, Pentalog, Skiller Whale, The Software House, iTechArt, LinearB, Lohika, Albany Partners, 101 Ways, PGS Software, Steamhaus, Swarmia

🥝 🥝  If you’re interested in reaching thousands of senior technology leaders and decision makers, drop a reply to this email to see our Partnership Opportunities! 🥝 🥝

Culture & People

Leading your engineering team through an unexpected product pivot

I want to share how my team at Etsy recovered from failing really slowly. We launched a high-profile product that didn’t meet customer needs after doing a nine-month waterfall buildout, and senior leadership decided that we needed to rethink our approach from the ground up.

What Good, Cash-Strapped Hiring Looks Like

All cash strapped operators who take their hiring seriously eventually end up designing a system with the same four principles. These are: There’s this belief that in order to hire well as an underfunded startup, you need to hire via compelling vision.

The Inclusive Language List for Job Ads

Exclusionary words creep into job ads. And, some are more obvious than others. Finding them (plus more inclusive words to replace them) is a time suck. Here are 75 examples of biased language I often find in job ads, with more inclusive replacements.

6 KPIs to make Hybrid work a success

Since 2020 the ways that employees interact with each other and their leadership has fundamentally changed.

Leadership & Self-management

How to tell your manager you can’t predict the future

You are most likely aware of it already but I will state the obvious: creating software is complex, difficult, and full of variation. You seldom build the same product, using the same tools and technology, several times in a row.

From grad to VP: my journey to leading Skyscanner’s engineering teams globally

Andrew Phillips is VP of Engineering at Skyscanner, and joined the company as a grad back in 2009. He shares his career journey, the things he’s learned along the way and the best advice he’s received in making the big leaps to senior roles.

4 Obstacles That Prevent You From Being A Strategic Leader

Strategic thinking is a challenge for leadership and management personnel alike. It’s an important part of what it means to be a leader. Therefore, it’s worth developing.

Resisting the Pressure to Overwork

Few of us want to overwork. Even when our jobs feel meaningful, we’d prefer to work to live, not live to work. We benefit from also devoting time to other interests and hobbies, family and friends, leisure, and learning not related to our professions. Those are meaningful to us too.

Agile, Engineering & Product

Shipping to Production

How you ship your code to production in a way that is fast and reliable, is a question more engineers and engineering leaders should educate themselves on.

Extreme Fast Delivery Without Creating Tech Debt: An Agile Case-Study

Does your engineering team ever receive large feature requests that MUST happen fast? You’re already envisioning how you’ll need to drop all your team’s tech standards to comply with the business requirements on time.

What Is Negative Engineering?

It was the second game of a double-header, and the Washington Nationals had a problem. Not on the field, of course: The soon-to-be World Series champions were performing beautifully. But as they waited out a rain delay, something went awry behind the scenes.

You’re just going to sit there???

Here’s a little story about something that happened last year. A paging alert fires for a service that a sibling team manages. I’m the support on-call, meaning that I answered support questions about the delivery engineering tooling.

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