Principal Engineer at Box, Silvia Botros (@dbsmasher) addresses the “Not my job” statement by emphasising the difference between glue work and gap-filling work, and the traps that senior technical leaders without authority (i.e. tech leads, staff, principal engineers) should avoid.

Sumit Dhaw (@sumit_dhawan) is President at VMWare, responsible for the company’s go-to-market functions including sales, customer experience and marketing. Although he’s not the typical technical leader (CTO, VP Engineering, etc), I’m including it here because there are so many great lessons about time management here relevant for all leaders. Note: Most leaders shouldn’t probably have such an extreme calendar but it’s a good insight into the day of a life of a higher management/executive role.

This was a fun article published by Richard Speed (@richard_speed) as part of their “On Call” series as a reminder that software should always be thought of part a broader socialtechnical system and people are often the most unpredictable parts 😅

I generally prefer the term foundation skills over soft skills because soft skills are hard! This article by Carla Rudder (@carlarudder) covers the skills CIOs are looking for in job candidates. For individual contributors, most of these tend to be deprioritised after technical skills but for future and current leaders, consider these a must-have!

I recently came across this project which I find a fascinating concept because I also see the problem this is trying to solve. If you’re interested in the background, then definitely read the paper (6 pages) recently (Feb 22) written by Oliver Drotbohm (@odrotbohm), Henning Schwentner (@hschwentner) and  Stephan Pirnbaum (@spirnbaum). Current implementations of this project are in Java, .Net and PHP.

An interesting conclusion by Nolan Lawson, who suggests that the default days of a Single Page App (SPA) might have passed. Food for thought for those building websites.

Ken Kantzer (@KennethKantzer) offers 16 lessons learned from running startup code audits starting with more generic tech lessons learned and becoming more specific on security (his background). Lots of good things for everyone in tech learn from and to watch out for.

I came across this website this week and found myself thinking, more organisations probably should look for these 1x instead of those 10x engineers 😬 which looks like (as far as I can tell) a project started by Tierney Cyren (@bitandbang)

An interesting article from Andrea Yu at the BBC who details some of the reasons why the younger generation might be feeling more burned out than others. All leaders and managers should take this into account if you’re working with any GEN Z people.

Reading time: 19mins or the PDF full report (26 pages)

Maybe connected to the previous article but also just as relevant, PwC recently published their finding from a 2022 survey of 52,000+ workers across 44 countries and territories worldwide which a focus on 5 major themes: The Great Resignation and pressure on pay, empowerment and skills, political and social issues in the workplace, demand for transparency and the future of hybrid working.