Tech Manager Weekly by CTO Craft - Issue #168
Hi there, welcome to the week!
We launched another of our Mentoring Circles a week ago, and what a fantastic, in-depth conversation it was - we spoke about remote onboarding, which led to a more general discussion around remote hiring, and then on to engineering metrics and measuring productivity. There was a waiting list for this group, which means another Circle is coming together already, and we'll probably start in August. If you'd like to chat about joining, just drop a reply to this email, or check out the CTO Craft website!
The CTO Craft Bytes series is steaming onward - not one, but two recorded events last week, on Meaningful Software Metrics and Dealing with People Debt. The recordings are up already, and there are more in the pipeline, along with free Group Discussions. Keep an eye on ctocraft.com/events to stay up to date!
Thanks to our sponsors this week, AWS and X-Team! Reply to this email if you'd like to know more about partnering with CTO Craft
Andy @ CTO Craft
From our Partners
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How X-Team Helps Scale Development Teams
Scaling a development team is a headache: it's time-consuming, costly, and comes without the guarantee that you'll hire developers you can trust. X-Team solves these challenges and helps leading companies like Fox, Dell, and Coinbase scale quickly with developers who drive projects forward. We can provide experienced teams of developers regardless of your tech stack.
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Watches of the Week
CTO Craft Bytes - Meaningful Software Metrics
A discussion of tools and approaches to measuring software development, enabling decision making and monitoring the health of your engineering team. Moderated by Glyn Roberts - 56 mins
How to Create a Breakthrough with Mike Maples
Investor and entrepreneur Mike Maples, Jr. and Shane Parrish discuss what a breakthrough is and how to achieve one - 5 mins
Culture & People
What does sponsorship look like?
Studies have shown that women (and nonbinary folks) are over-mentored, but under-sponsored. As Herminia Ibarra, professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD and coauthor of the HBR article Why Men Still Get More Promotions Than Women explains,
Emerging Data Roles: The Analytics Engineer
Analytics Engineer: this term has started showing up in blog posts and job listings. It all happened quickly; just a couple of years ago, it wasn't a thing our friends in the data ecosystem talked about.
5 Engineering Manager Archetypes
In today’s tech organisations, you find 2 types of technical leadership roles in teams – Tech Leads and Engineering Managers. Tech Leads are better defined with The Definition of a Tech Lead but the Engineering Manager (EM) role remains unclear.
How Much Should You Pay Your Engineers To Ensure They Stick Around?
There’s no way around it: software engineers are expensive. This is especially true if you’re looking for experience in the hot topics of today like full stack web engineering, blockchain, augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI).
Leadership & Self-management
It’s Time to Rethink Leadership Around Leading for Resilience
Throughout history, crises have been the breeding ground for individuals we later describe as great leaders. If the times make the leader, in many instances, those leaders emerge from unlikely places.
Finding And Becoming The Helpful Leader
Recently, my colleague Jack Zenger and I did some research on resilience and discovered that leaders who provided service to others and described as "Helpful" were more resilient.
Correcting a Team Member: Avoid My Damaging Rookie Mistakes
I have written before on how to deal with mistakes when the mistake is obvious: when people introduce software bugs, break the build, or delete something by accident. There’s a clear route to follow, and you have an opportunity to improve team safety in the process.
Stop Giving Answers… Ask Powerful Questions Instead
Scenario: a team member runs into an impediment. Comes to the team lead or the scrum master, and asks “What should I do?” Our culture emphasizes that leaders must be wiser, set direction, and articulate values, all of which predisposes them to tell rather than ask.
Agile, Engineering & Product
17 Metrics for Modern Dev Leaders
Learn the software metrics that help accelerate delivery, maintain a positive culture, and translate dev activity to business value. Motivation to be data-driven As dev leaders, we spend most of our time translating between two groups of people in two parallel universes.
Stand-Up 2.0: It’s Time to Ditch The Daily From 1993
The daily stand-up is broken. No wonder. It was invented almost 30 years ago and we’re still running it the exact same way.
Software Architecture and Agile. Are they both really compatible?
In this article, we will discuss how Software Architecture and Agile Methods can be used together to make the most of them. There are tons of different definitions to describe what Software Architecture is. This one particularly appeals to me:
What is Programmer Anarchy and does it have a future?
A developer I know recently told me that he wasn’t interested in any new opportunities in the short term because his team were about to adopt Fred George’s post-agile concept of Programmer Anarchy. Having piqued my interest, I started to explore and thought I would share my findings.
What Else?
Face Depixelizer
Well, this is just scary...
Given a low-resolution input image, model generates high-resolution images that are perceptually realistic and downscale correctly.
That’s it!
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Have an amazing week!
Andy