🥜 Chaos Management, Tokens vs Feedlots, Chain of Command, Technical Interviews, OWASP for Vibe Code, Motivation Drift: TMW #485

Hello, hello, hello, welcome to the week!

CTO Craft and TMW Member Survey 2026

It's been a few years since we've run a general survey of all our members and subscribers, which means it's high time we build a fresh understanding of who we are as a community - this is our chance to build a better picture of who the subscribers are, what you do, what your challenges are and where you're heading in your career. The payback is even better content, events, newsletters for you and the tens of thousands of others who subscribe or take part - it's massively important to us.

It only takes a few minutes to bring our information into 2026 - please do take a look today!

CTO Craft Member Survey 2026

We’d like to know more about CTO Craft’s community members!

That's it, let's look at some links....

Andy @ CTO Craft

Ps. If you're in an engineering leadership role, you absolutely need to be on top of the latest data on compensation and long-term incentives - have a look at our recent Compensation Report for all the latest insights.

Compensation Survey Report 2026 | CTO Craft

Welcome to the 2026 CTO Compensation Report, presented by CTO Craft and Albany.

CTO CraftMatt Hunt

CTO Craft Con - Dates for Your Diary

CTO Craft Con: Europe 2026

Join CTO Craft Con Europe 2026 in Amsterdam - an intimate, community-centered gathering for engineering leaders to connect, learn through insightful sessions, and build real peer relationships in a supportive environment.

CTO Craft Con: Europe 2026

CTO Craft Con: Fintech

Join CTO Craft Con: Fintech in London - an intimate, community-centered gathering for engineering leaders to connect, learn through insightful sessions, and build real peer relationships in a supportive environment.

CTO Craft Con: Fintech

CTO Craft | Conversations Roadshow

Each gathering follows the same small-group, peer-led format, but every event is shaped by its local context. Attendees, facilitators, and discussion topics differ from city to city, reflecting the challenges and opportunities CTOs are experiencing in that region.

Conversations Roadshow

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Worth your calendar: Infobip Shift 2026, September 13–15, Zadar, Croatia

If you're evaluating whether to add a conference to your September - Shift in Zadar is worth the look. It's a developer and engineering leadership conference run by Infobip, now in its 10th year. 4,000 attendees. Speakers from Apple and NVIDIA. The focus is systems that run in production, architectural decisions at scale, and the kind of conversations that don't happen on LinkedIn.

As a TMW subscriber, you have access to a 10% discount!

Grab your discounted ticket here!

CTO Craft Events Coming Up

• 🇪🇪 Talinn Mixer - June 18th
• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 London Mixer - July 2nd
• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Manchester Mixer - July 15th
• 🇩🇪 Berlin Mixer - July 29th
• 🇮🇪 Dublin Mixer - August 20th

See the whole calendar here - not in your city yet? Drop us a line!

Reads of the Week

Surviving in the “chaos management” era

More “AI skills” is not what you need right now

manager.devAnton Zaides

Leadership, Strategy & Business

A Lesson From the Feedlot

A recent wildly popular post argued that a $5,000 token budget per engineer per month is optimal, and that anything less or more would be suboptimal. Some people now believe that consuming information …

Writing is clarifying

Never Be the Risk Absorber

Moving past the vendor-client relationship in engineering

High-Impact EngineeringRoman Nikolaev

Chain of command: your organization’s biggest single point of failure

Most organizations rely on a single chain of command. That’s like having one road in cyclone country (one flood away from total disconnection).

Corporate Rebels

AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy

Both sides are grappling with a real existential threat, and both sides feel like they are screaming into the void. Here’s how to close the gap and get everyone pulling in the same direction.

charity.wtfCharity Majors

Culture, People & Teams

The Last Technical Interview

Today we will pour one out for the vaunted technical interview process, which is on its last leg. And we’ll talk a little about what’s…

MediumSteve Yegge

Why Hybrid is Still Misunderstood

Days in the office is a proxy measure. It is not a strategy.

Chris KaneChris Kane

Research: What Interruptions Reveal About Company Culture

Workplace culture is shaped less by mission statements or engagement initiatives than by everyday interaction patterns—especially interruptions in meetings. A study of 27 employees and leaders found that women and employees from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups were interrupted more frequently, often before completing their ideas. Many participants adapted by speaking less, self-censoring, or withdrawing from discussions altogether. Leaders can build more equitable, psychologically safe cultures by recognizing interruption patterns, slowing conversations down, and actively protecting people’s contributions in real time.

Harvard Business ReviewWilliam Degbey and Benjamin Laker and Baniyelme Zoogah and Sanjay Kumar Singh and Ghulam Murtaza

Middle Managers Feel the Least Psychological Safety and That Is Destroying Your Organization

Part 3 of 9, The Trust Architecture: Building Organizations Where People Actually Believe Each Other

David T NormanDavid T Norman

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Building Software Is Learning

An internal note to the Amp team on feedback and shipping faster

Register SpillThorsten Ball

Code Isn’t Product

A year ago I wrote about how AI would shift the bottlenecks in product development from the middle of the cycle — writing code — to the end, where we help customers understand what we built, try it, and turn it into value (money). And to the front, where we figure out

Rich Mironov's Product BytesRichard Mironov

Making the OWASP top ten in the vibe code era - Stack Overflow

Stack OverflowPhoebe Sajor

The demon of the gaps

Mephistopheles (a medieval demon from German folklore) flying over Wittenberg, in a lithograph by Eugène Delacroix. Modern software systems contain within them a mind-boggling level of complexity. …

Surfing ComplexityLorin Hochstein

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

Do the hardest thing

Most small business ideas are a hard job attached to an easy idea. Instead, you should do your hardest idea.

Justin Jackson

What It’s Like To IPO

What It’s Like to IPO

Stay SaaSyStay SaaSy

Motivation Drift • Ness Labs Newsletter

The Ness Letters are a weekly newsletter by Ness Labs, exploring how we can think better, work smarter, and live happier.

Ness Labs

How Worry Shrinks You - Leadership Freak

The most unremarkable thing leaders do is worry about themselves. Self-concern is natural. Self-obsession is destructive. Life shrinks when self-protection becomes your goal. Turn fear into service. Click to learn how.

Leadership FreakDan Rockwell

That’s it!

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Have an amazing week!

Andy