What do tech leads do again? (No. 72)
Let's explore the issue, again, as a sneak peek on Saturday's FREE TRAINING!
Tech Leads—
How is it already Tuesday?!?!
Sorry I’m a full day late getting this email out.
We’re Doing Live Training on Saturday and You’re Getting a Sneak Peek!
Reminder that this week I’m focused on prepping for this weekend’s first live tech lead training session. I hope you’ll be able to make it on Saturday! I’m planning to go pretty strong on why tech leadership is so important, what tech leads do, and how to be ready for almost anything with the Four Core.
To get a little meta for a minute, I’m using the term “Saturday Sessions” in my own internal mental branding for it, but let’s see how this weekend and next go. If it’s worthwhile and impactful, I’ll keep it up! If not, we’ll try something else.
As promised, however, I’ll relay some of Saturday’s content in today’s letter (number 72!).
We’re focusing today on what tech leads do and whether you should be making a run at the role in the first place.
What Do Tech Leads Do?
“What do tech leads do?” is a perennial question among newbie or aspiring tech leads, so I could hardly leave it out of this weekend’s training.
But let’s explore it a little in today’s letter.
The Short Answer
The short answer to the question is actually crazy long. In short, tech leads may do any or all of the following:
Drive technical visions for projects
Mentoring junior members
Driving code quality
Leading technical decisions
Leading team meetings
Driving code reviews
Organizing and distributing technical work
Tracking the build and project
Shipping releases
Leading architecture
Helping to define the product w/ product managers
Pushing back on product managers
Owning and managing technical debt
Being an advocate for the team
Doing some people management stuff
Being a surrogate of the engineering manager
Defining story points and owning scoping
Driving resolutions of problems and disputes on the team
Making hiring and firing recommendations
Experimenting with new technologies and introducing them to the team or project
Engaging the upstream open source community,
Approving, rejecting, or otherwise managing pull requests
Interacting with other technical teams,
And on and on and on……..
That’s a crazy long list and I don’t think any tech lead needs to do all of the above. Furthermore, I don’t think any tech lead—no matter how good—could be successful if they attempted to do all of that.
So which of those tasks are going to apply to you? Well, it depends. Read on tech leads!
The Longer Answer
The longer answer to the very long short answer (did you follow that tech leads?) is that what any one tech lead actually does depends on a few big factors.
To even get started on what those “big factors” are, we need to zoom out and think about why management and especially engineering management exists in the first place. As an individual contributor, often your interpretation of what management does is a little upside down because you’re basically, for lack of a better analogy, looking up at the forest of trees from the bottom.
But management isn’t really there to serve you as an individual contributor (as I thought years ago); instead, it’s (largely, anyway) there to make sure that investors’ capital and financial resources get allocated correctly to return a profit (or provide the right services, in the case of government and non-profits).
Of course, there’s a whole school of thought that managers aren’t really needed if you get the right people together, but most investors will not be comfortable with this arrangement. And besides, the jury is still out as to whether such a thing actually works at scale (see, e.g., Zappos, ConsenSys).
So anyway, investors generally look to managers to be accountable to make sure the right things are happening at the right time. And that managerial “power” (so to speak) gets delegated and sliced up as you move down the org tree to your engineering management.
Your engineering manager, in turn, may delegate some of his or her authority to you as a tech lead.
Why? There could be a couple of reasons.
First, they might be too busy or spread too thinly across too many developers (I’ve heard of EMs having as many as 15 direct reports) to be able to track everything that’s going on.
Second, they might see you as having some leadership capabilities and they want to cut you some rope to see what you do with it (don’t hang yourself with that rope tech leads!).
Third, and the worst possible scenario, is that you’re really senior and your managers aren’t sure what to do with you or you’re the smartest engineer on the team and they feel like they need to retain you. So they call you a “tech lead” because they feel like they need to do something if they’re not actually promoting you. This is the scenarios that creates such a bad rep. (Sorry if I just described you. If I did, reach out. I can help you fix it.)
Also, there are two different ways you might become the tech lead. It could be a formal role where the duties and descriptions are clearly drawn out and/or you are formally promoted into the role. I see this a lot in some of the bigger software companies like Google.
The more common approach, however, is for the engineering manager (or equivalent) to informally designate you as the “tech lead.”
Even though it’s the more common pattern, this informal designation is the hardest because the expectations aren’t clearly defined nor are the success criteria. That’s partly just because of the casual way the need arises and partly because the managers are likely willing to let you take as much responsibility as you want. And it’s largely why I created the Tech Lead Coaching Network :-)
Anyway, long story short, as a tech lead, you’re really just a delegate of the engineering management team. I don’t want to take anything away from the importance of this step in your career, however. By now, you should have heard me say over and over how excited I am for this step in your career. It’s probably the biggest step up in your career, so it’s super exciting. But it’s also fairly limited.
On Monday’s podcast, I dove into two more topics, like how technical you should be and whether you should even take the role in the first place (e.g., what are your motivations for it?). Give it a listen, but I’m already running long and LATE on today’s letter.
Have a great week tech leads and will try to get back on track tomorrow!
-michael
Thanks for reading!
The Tech Lead Coaching email list and podcast are written and recorded by Michael Rice to bring more clarity, certainty, and confidence to my tech leads.
Tips? Have something you’d like me to cover or someone you want to me talk to? Drop me an email to me@michaelrice.com. Hope you will.
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