How technical should you be as a tech lead? (No. 58)
The anxieties of leaving a technical role.
Hey tech leads,
Today, we’re going to talk about a difficult topic: how much should you invest in technical skills versus “soft skills” (like, tech leadership)? How much is the choice driven by your employer and how much is driven by your own goals?
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There’s an old video of Steve Jobs that always stresses me out when I watch it because he has a lot conviction and obviously delivers his message with a lot more credibility than I have, but it there’s a bunch I disagree with.
Among other things, he says he would hire only folks with the latest, cutting edge skills (not necessarily the most experienced) and that “if you’re a great person, why do you want to work for anyone you can’t learn anything from?” Importantly, he says, “the great managers are great individual contributors who never, ever wanted to manage but decide that they have to be a manager because no one could ever do as good a job as they could.”
In other words, only the very technically strongest would rise to lead roles. I’m not sure how it actually plays/played out at Apple, but this was what he said. And I’ve seen other companies try to follow it with disastrous results.
I can see how this model leads to results for a young product company and its founder and investors, but there are serious problems with it that I’ll need to save for another day—need to think more about it.
This is a touchy topic for some, including me
Maybe this topic will hit a soft spot with you. As a tech lead or engineering manager, in your early days, you might have some anxiety about getting too far away from the code. Not only does code offer some certainty compared to the relative ambiguity of people management, the truth is that you’re probably not very good at managing or leading people right now.
There’s a chart I like to draw for newbies. The left side represents the relative strength of tech skills, which, as you start spending a lot more time in meetings and less time deep in the code, are just naturally going to decline (the purple line). It’s down and to left.
The line on the right (red line) represents your growing management and leadership skills. It’s up and to the right.
The decline on the left and the incline on the right are both gradual, so when you’re in the middle of the “chasm,” you might be really uncomfortable. You’re getting farther away from the code, but you’re also still not quite “there” yet on your management and leadership skill.
And worse, if for some reason you find yourself looking for new jobs while you’re in this chasm, you’ll quickly notice that, for every one engineering manager or tech lead job post, there are five to ten individual contributor developer jobs.
Where should you spend your time?
In the context of that, if you only had, say, ten hours a week to work on personal development, how would you spend the time? Part of the way you answer the question depends a lot on how committed you are to crossing that chasm I just described. Assuming you are committed to crossing it sooner or later, would you spend all ten hours on tech, on leadership development, or some split.
It’s definitely a hard question to answer and I don’t know of a single manager or tech lead who doesn’t struggle with the question. But if you want to stay in a lead role, you’re going to need to develop both skillsets, and you’re going to need to find the right mixture that works for you and your career.
Instead of trying to answer such a hard, deeply personal question, maybe the best I can do in this letter is to give you some analytical tools to think it through. There are two angles to approach the question: (1) what’s the appropriate mix for employers/companies to seek and (2) what’s the right mix for you personally?
Different needs for different environments
Starting with employers, at the far right of the spectrum we find very small, product-focused, high-tech hardware or software companies. For these organizations, crafting a great product is absolutely paramount. They are often under pressure to get a great product in the market, so the right mix for product-focused startups might be a very rich mixture of tech over lead skills.
Of course, everyone could use strong people and leadership skills in their team in addition to whatever mixture of tech skills. But given the choice between two candidates, one very strong on leadership but light on tech versus another candidate who’s very strong on tech but light on leadership, the choice should be relatively straightforward.
This is probably roughly where the Steve Jobs head was in the video. Even though Apple is pretty big now, it’s still got a tradition as a strong product company, especially back then.
By the way, if you’ll let me take a brief detour, remember there are species of management and often “managers” do a bit of both: managing things and managing people. For small, product-focused companies, they need a lot more management over “things” like code, features, engineering methods, architecture, velocity, and etc. Of course, you need people make the things happen, but “things” managers tend to look through the people to the end result they’re seeking.
If you’ll let me take a further detour, I should mention that this email list and my podcast are very heavily oriented on the people side of things. You shouldn’t interpret that as suggesting you should emphasize it so strongly. I emphasize it here because it’s a voice and point of view I didn’t see anywhere else out there. Even though I never talk about it here, for example, I still think of myself as highly technical.
At the other end of the spectrum are really big, bureaucratic companies that aren’t particularly focused on tech. While there can be pockets within the company that are product focused, these companies are often going to emphasize processes and people development moreso than the startup world, of course. So the mix is going to be richer on the leadership side than in the startup world.
Different strokes for different folks
Given that spectrum of needs from the employer side, let’s turn to you as an employee, as an individual, and consider what you want your own personal mix to be.
There are two ways to think of it. First what kind of company do you want to work for? If you accept my analysis above, then your mixture probably needs to match the needs of the types of employers—if you want to maximize the number of your employment opportunities, anyway.
Another way to think about it, from your perspective, is to ask what kind of influence you think you might want to have long-term. For lack of a better word, I call it wingspan.
You’re probably early in your journey and may not really know what you want to do with certainty. But it should be obvious that if you want to have a much bigger impact and grow your influence, you’re going to need to invest in a richer mix of leadership capabilities, unless the influence you want to have is strongly product-based.
Maybe we should talk more about the possible mixtures in a future letter because there is a lot there.
So in summary, I’ve spent a lot of my career in consulting, and in classic consultant form, I didn’t answer the question of how you should configure your own mixture of tech versus lead skills. Still, hopefully this gives you at least some ideas about how you should answer the question for yourself.
Hope your Wednesday was productive, tech leads!
-michael
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