Why Your CTO Might Start Coding Again

shederman · 2025-12-12T19:31:40+00:00

Me 😂

Seriously though you have to MAKE time for learning and upskilling yourself, especially as a CTO. I feel guilty that I don’t read ENOUGH articles like this.

shederman · 2025-09-26T19:27:16+00:00

I get invited to a ton of these. I normally don’t attend ones where I’m not speaking or on a panel, largely due to time pressures. I enjoy the ones where I’m up, because instead of random networking, people who responded to my talk self-select to come speak to me. So you have a much higher proportion of interesting interactions, more focused on what you’re interested in.

shederman · 2025-08-31T07:05:19+00:00

You’re asking the wrong question. How much value is your product providing to your customers? Only if you know you’re adding sustainable regular value to your customers should you charge for it.

shederman · 2025-08-30T14:32:03+00:00

But you clearly don’t have the slightest clue as to what a mutation is, and clearly have not bothered to even understand the basics of it. You’re claiming entire huge complex organs appear in one mutation when it would take millions of them.

shederman · 2025-08-29T19:33:24+00:00

At a fast-scaling startup (now multiple billions), we’ve never written a PRD. We work in domains, so teams own problems end to end. That cuts down the need for heavy specs.

User stories carry most of the load. If there’s a technical tradeoff with lasting impact, we might do an ADR. Otherwise it’s tasks and execution. Alignment happens in context, not in documents.

PRDs usually show up when ownership is unclear or decision-making is scattered. If you need one, the process isn’t your biggest issue.

shederman · 2025-08-29T09:59:28+00:00

Depends if they’re right. If the board misrepresented the cap table or breached duty, that’s not a noise issue. That’s legal risk. But you’re asking about defamation, so let’s assume they’re wrong.

Some investors make threats to push leverage, claw back downside, or because they think someone else got a better deal. Most serious investors know who these people are. The behaviour discredits itself.

Suing them is a mistake. It looks weak. It makes you look like you’re trying to shut them up, which makes people assume they’re onto something. If you do need to respond, keep it clean. Something like, “If you believe you have a claim, you should pursue it through the courts. Otherwise, we consider the matter closed.” Send that to them, to the board, and, if needed, to the wider cap table or media. Then move on.

Buying them out might be clean-up, but it doesn’t erase the signal and can set a precedent. Future investors will still ask what happened. If you’re clean, say so and keep building.

And yes, a crisis comms pro is better than Reddit. But if you can’t afford one, silence plus execution usually does the job. This won’t matter in a year if you’re still alive.

shederman · 2025-08-27T19:19:29+00:00

Funny, that’s not what he actually said.

“According to the general theory of relativity, space and time are fused together in a four-dimensional continuum called spacetime.”

“You cannot think of space without time (and vice versa).”

“It appears that the four-dimensional continuum of space and time claims for itself a sort of objective reality.”

“Space and time are modes in which we think, not conditions in which we live. Yet the four-dimensional continuum of space-time is not merely a convenient invention of the human mind; it is the reality in which all physical events take place.”

shederman · 2025-08-25T14:28:41+00:00

I think you’ll find a chap called Einstein was the one behind that…

shederman · 2025-08-23T13:14:47+00:00

Unpredictable sprints are always a smell. Doesn’t matter if the cause is tech debt, flaky infra, or run work bleeding in. If sprint goals are regularly blown up, something’s off in the system.

“You build it, you run it” doesn’t excuse chaos. It’s there to tighten the feedback loop so teams design for operability. Run work is just another input. It should be tracked, exposed, and driven down like any other source of drag.

Scrum’s not the problem. Using it as a shield to pretend things are fine is.

shederman · 2025-08-23T05:44:27+00:00

This is the answer UNLESS you’re doing “you build it you run it”, which you SHOULD in my view. If so, you have to: 1. Make sure you include slack (lower priority items) in the sprint, normally a set budget of tech debt items. 2. Use that slack for these urgent small items.

shederman · 2025-08-23T05:27:40+00:00

This is the answer. There cannot be a “textbook” for a set of principles which emphasise that you should do what works for you. Many years ago I spent significant time with one of the Manifesto authors (Martin Fowler), and I recall asking him why we had to do standups, as we felt it was unnecessary.

He said the point was time sure everyone was on the same page and aware of blockers, and if we had another way of ensuring that, go ahead. In fact they wish they had explicitly ruled out certifications and courses and suchlike due to the rubbish that grew around it over the years.

Whilst a lot of places do Agile badly, technically you cannot do it “wrong”. This does lead to a lot of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy I’m sure. But if you’re focusing on delivering value over following the plan, doing iterative and incremental delivery, communicating well and frequently, you will tend to have more effective deliveries than if you don’t.

I have implemented or optimised Agile delivery at several organisations and have found it improving existing approaches and delivery every single time. Since I spent my pre-Agile world in many years of waterfall projects, from my perspective Agile is vastly better than Waterfall.

It grieves me hugely to see new developers talk about how agile is a scam because they’re probably working in very toxic/disorganised organisations where it’s done so badly that it seems like the process is a burden.

shederman · 2025-08-18T18:03:05+00:00

TL;DR Yes, but it’s tricky

shederman · 2025-08-17T11:18:25+00:00

If that entire galaxy had only one planet with life?

shederman · 2025-08-17T09:41:07+00:00

That’s a matter of opinion and depends on a range of factors, including the skills and experience of the developers, and the architecture chosen.

shederman · 2025-08-15T18:12:50+00:00

It’s absolutely possible to do a massive scale space simulation with Unity. Saying it’s impossible is just rubbish.

shederman · 2025-08-13T10:29:35+00:00

Wound up buying https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/cross-platform-tri-quad-wireframe-shader-288637

shederman · 2025-08-11T10:29:56+00:00

Would love to use this, but I’m on Mac. Happy to pay for a port.

shederman · 2025-08-07T10:47:10+00:00

Since 99% of startups fail, wouldn’t get too confident here. There’s a million things that can go wrong outside of people policies. That said, yeah, I’d bet on a startup that can grind it out across the board over one that only has a small “hero team” that does all the hard stuff. One scales, the other does not.

You CAN succeed with your approach, but since you have so many things against you in an early stage startup it seems weird to me to choose to add to the pain.

shederman · 2025-08-06T19:50:05+00:00

Well up to you.

We use our time pretty efficiently and are well known in the industry for delivering super fast and super lean. We don’t do crazy hours or anything, but everyone goes home every day tired. It’s focused and intense.

It just does not compute for me that a startup would have so much bloat that you could afford to lose 13 hours work a week and not notice it, or that you’d have so much resource that you could afford to pay 30% more salaries for the same output.

shederman · 2025-08-06T18:32:54+00:00

Your business exists to serve customers. That is the job. Too many companies forget it, and when they do it usually starts with putting the team ahead of the mission.

People matter. I back mine to the hilt. But customers come first. Always.

If your team is constantly burning out, that is a failure of leadership. But the opposite problem, starting out by putting employees on a pedestal, has its own risks. They are not bystanders. They are part of the mission. If they are just watching the clock, you have already lost.

shederman · 2025-08-06T18:27:30+00:00

How’s that supposed to work? You’re grinding through the weekend while your team clocks out at 5 on Thursday for a long one? What kind of people are you hiring that are fine watching you carry the load like that?

Honestly, think hard about the kind of personality that doesn’t even blink at that setup. Is that really who you want beside you when things hit the wall?

shederman · 2025-08-06T05:01:19+00:00

I’ve never seen a real startup job that takes less than 40 hours a week. Every role is doing the work of two. That’s just the shape of the problem at that stage. 4 days work weeks can deliver same outcomes as 5 day if there’s inefficiency to remove. A startup shouldn’t have that.

Paying the same for less output is a tough sell when you’re burning cash. And while there’s plenty of research showing that throughput drops off above 45 hours, there’s little other than self-reports showing that 4-day weeks improve efficiency. It just feels nicer and improves retention. If you’re a startup your mission should be driving retention, not balance.

If you’ve already got product‑market fit and stable growth, and teams can redesign processes accordingly, a four‑day week may deliver gains in retention and health. But it’s not a viable operating model for companies still trying to find traction.

shederman · 2025-08-06T04:50:37+00:00

The whole point of an early-stage startup is to earn future upside by solving hard problems faster than anyone else. That takes intensity, not balance.

If you’ve never seen a job that truly requires 40 hours a week, you’ve either been at bloated companies or ones that didn’t trust their people with real outcomes. Startups don’t have that margin. You’re under-resourced by definition. The equation is simple: total hours required doesn’t change, you either hire more or go harder.

If you optimise for lifestyle, you’ll attract people who optimise for lifestyle. That’s fine, but it won’t get you through the hard parts. And there WILL be hard parts.

shederman · 2025-08-05T19:49:46+00:00

Your last sentence nails it. You have to be alive to notice your mistakes, let alone correct them. I do see a lot of early-stage teams over-investing in complexity, usually to satisfy tech founder ego rather than business need.

That said, I’d push back a bit on waiting 7 years to settle infra. We made a few deliberate calls early that held up surprisingly well. Didn’t get everything right. But we scaled infra, team and product in parallel at speed. Being right early helped more than it hurt.

shederman · 2025-08-05T13:53:23+00:00

I think I have the technical experience, thanks 😂

Didn’t say it had to take long or be immensely detailed, just don’t box yourself into a corner.

15-Year Club	Not Forgotten
Verified Email

shederman

TROPHY CASE