Ask HN: Advice for a new and inexperienced tech lead?

I'd refuse. You've basically disqualified yourself. If you mean well by your team you go and train under an experienced tech lead and then move up when you think you are confident you can actually do the job. Mid level developers should not be tech leads.

Think in terms of risk and ease of changing your mind / product.

Decisions which carry little risk and are easy to undo or pivot in the future, make them quickly and confidently.

Decisions which carry non-negligible risk but are easy to undo, give some thought but don’t fret too much. If the risk starts becoming reality, you can change your mind later.

Hard to change decisions with low risk are tricky. Make sure the time spent on research and decision making is proportional to the risk, which in theory is low, but that needs to be double-checked.

Decisions that are hard to undo and carry significant risk should be the ones you spend as much time as necessary thinking through, planning out, coming up with contingency plans, building in safety checks and making sure that you can avoid making those hard-to-make changes should you decision prove incorrect.

If you establish a strong, rigorous software QA process, everything will be like butter. Your team will feel more confident about the product they release - and thus about you and each other, and you will have fewer emergencies to deal with, moreover with this virtuous cycle in place you'll generally be more on top and proactive about problem when they occur, rather than it just being another stressful thing in the backlog.

Yeah these people exist. But even these people have something that will drive them.

I'm not saying that you have to find the spark or that even everyone has the ability to find it. Sometimes, the challenge is so great that it's just not worth it or beyond your abilities.

But it's still there for everyone. If you're really really good, you can find out what it is for most people and trigger it.

@Voxoff,

What have your experiences and tasks been so far as a mid-level developer? What were you in charge of? Did you have a regular rapport with other departments, with clients, stakesholders? Did they talk to you directly when they "wanted things done"?

What are the sizes of the companies that you've worked in already? How big over all, how big were the teams you were on?

I'm surprised no one is asking these questions to see what existing experience you do have can contribute to this, because it is possible that this might be a natural extension of what you already do. It's company-size specific, but good to ask all the same.

In smaller companies, being a mid-level developer means occasionally having to make a call that directly impacts the bottom line and talking to the CEO and clients in a very matter-of-fact way. You wouldn't know that from just the title of a person however.