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7 min read

🎻 Coding Interviews, Org Debt, Crisis Leadership, Over-Committing, Remote Teams, Alignment vs Output, Self-Sabotage: TMW #506

Fintech CTOs - see you this week in London!
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This week's TMW is sponsored by ChainGuard - eliminate malware and vulnerability risk across your containers, dependencies, CI/CD actions, and AI agent skills so your developers can just ship.

Hello, hello, hello, welcome to the week!

It's Fintech Week!

Today marks the first day of this year's CTO Craft Con: Fintech event, in London's Square Mile. We'll be joined by over 200 of Europe's best engineering leaders working in the fintech space, with talks by leaders from Monzo, Yonder, Flagstone, Zopa, Funding Circle, Lloyds, SumUp, Marshmallow, BlackRock and dozens of others. There'll be networking, lunch & learns, interactive breakout conversations, and all the usual fun and games.

If you're coming along, do come and say hello - I'd love to meet you!

That's it, let's look at some links! See you next week

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Con - Dates for Your Diary

SPONSORED
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Whisky Business: A Secure Tasting with Chainguard
Thursday 12 November | 5pm–6.30pm GMT | Virtual

One unverified dependency can compromise an entire stack. Join Chainguard and Great Drams for a guided virtual whisky tasting about chain of custody, in both whisky and software. Over five drams, including a rare 20 Year Old single cask, you’ll swap notes with fellow engineering leaders on reducing supply chain risk and keeping what you ship verified and trusted. There’s also a quiz with a bottle prize. 

UK only. Register by 6th November to receive your tasting kit in time. Places are limited!

Can't make the whisky tasting? Here are 5 board-ready security metrics for CISOs to help keep tabs on your attack surface and ensure your organization remains safe amid automation in the age of AI.

Register for the whisky tasting here 👉

CTO Craft Mixers Coming Up

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

Reads of the Week

Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers
The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic. I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal. I have a spicily optimistic take: I think there's a huge opportunity for junior engineers.
Felix RiesebergFelix Rieseberg
Why Everything Feels Harder Than It Should
What is organizational debt
Suzan's FieldnotesSuzan Bond

Leadership, Strategy & Business

Leading Through a Crisis
What the Leader Does While Someone Else Fixes the Problem
It Depends: Lessons in Technology LeadershipKevin Goldsmith
Professional Antipatterns: the manager who committed the team overnight
One evening my manager announced in chat that he would commit the team, by email that night, to delivering the next day a customer extension that needed at least three weeks of several senior engineers. The deadline was missed and the team was blamed for committing. Why commitments made upward and blame sent downward drain a team, and what asking first looks like.
lezli01László Szabó
How to Lead When You’re No Longer the Expert
How can technology leaders make informed decisions beyond their expertise? Learn to ask better questions, interpret answers and know when to seek help.
LinkedInLee Clayton
The Manager's Schedule Is a Trap — Aviv Ben-Yosef
Another day has run its course and you feel out of breath. Your days are constantly packed, playing calendar Tetris. You’ve gotten a Pavlovian response to…
Aviv Ben-YosefAviv Ben-Yosef · 4 min read

Culture, People & Teams

Does remote require seniors?
Veteran CTO who built successful companies through empathic leadership and mastery of software delivery - from sustainable code to stakeholder trust. Now exploring the future of empathic and sustainable tech.
Is LeetCode Dead? What’s the Alternative?
How technical interviews are evolving in the age of AI, and what you need to know.
Engineering LeadershipGregor Ojstersek
TBM 448: The Software Factory as Identity Defense (and Reinvention)
We’re reimagining the future of work one professional silo at a time.
The Beautiful MessJohn Cutler
How to Build a Remote Engineering Team People Want to Stay On
What 20+ years of remote work have taught me.
Thriving In EngineeringAlex Ponomarev

Technology, Operations & Delivery

More output, less progress?
Real alignment is now our biggest challenge
manager.devAnton Zaides and Francisco Trindade
When AI Code Fails Review, Fix the Loop
Dev Leader Weekly 162
Dev Leader WeeklyDev Leader
Are we living in the golden age of Agile?
Scrum is fading. Agile isn’t.
High-Impact EngineeringRoman Nikolaev
Jobs every engineer should automate with agents
How we turned our dev chores into scheduled prompts
build modeJina Yoon

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

TBM 447: Why We Sabotage Our Careers
And why trying harder to fix ourselves isn't always the answer.
The Beautiful MessJohn Cutler
Overwhelmed As A Manager? 3 Ways To Fix It Quickly | David Burkus
If you’re feeling overwhelmed as a manager, you probably blame yourself. But it's not you, it's the math of your calendar.
David BurkusDavid Burkus
Speak the language of the people you want to reach
Before you try to convince someone or tell them what is going on: ask what the other person needs and what their goals are, with three questions to start.
ReflactoDaniel Schmeiß
What If the Most Caring Act of Leadership Is Learning to Lead Yourself? | The Leading Blog: A Leadership Blog
Leadership Now is a leading source for leadership development and analysis. We believe that anyone can make a difference by leading from where they are.
The Leading Blog: A Leadership Blog

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!

Campus by CTO Craft: The Go-to Resource for Senior Technology Leaders
Created for CTOs, by CTOs: A transformative learning community for senior technology leaders in startups and scale-ups
CTO Craft Campus

Interested in sponsoring TMW or any of our events? Check out some stats here

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

Published by:

Andy Skipper