Ask HN: How do I deal with my engineering team and motivate myself?

Well this may sound very familiar to most of HN but it also makes it the best place to ask this question.

Background: I am a project lead in a Digital Media company and I am taking care of the engineering aspect of our products. I only get a chance to pair code with my team and hardly get any alone coding time apart from few R&D And POC work. I have some 7 years of core development experience and my past 2 roles were Team lead and tech lead handling a team of 8 to 12 member engineering team. I am mostly dealing with large scale complex projects. I consider my self fairly Okay when it comes to my Software engineering concepts. And I keep pushing my team to learn new stuff and educate them whatever I learn.

Problem: Instead of my best efforts in taking care of my team and teaching them engineering aspect, I FEEL THEY DON'T LIKE ME and think I am jerk. I felt like asking this now because this is not the situation in current company but it has been in my past 2 companies as well. So I am wondering if I am really that bad.

Just to let you know I constantly keep asking for feedback from my Reporting managers and my team and keep on improving. However I think that I am expecting too much from my team when it comes to engineering and they may not like me because of that.

Any suggestions on the approach I can take? Let me know if you have any further questions.

"educate them what ever I learn" here I meant just making them aware about what is latest going on I am not pushing for that, instead I push them to learn about stuff which will be useful in near future.

Engineers like to see that their contribution has real impact on the company. If team does well, delivers project with good quality in reasonable time-frame and despite such efforts if the company languishes then employees will not feel motivated.

> Instead of my best efforts in taking care of my team and teaching them engineering aspect, I FEEL THEY DON'T LIKE ME and think I am jerk. I felt like asking this now because this is not the situation in current company but it has been in my past 2 companies as well. So I am wondering if I am really that bad.

Chances are, your keen observational skills are better than your winning personality.

Its a good bet that you're taking a paternalistic approach to managing your team, based on your feeling that you're taking care of them and teaching them. This never goes over well. Like, ever. Recognize that your team probably would rather write some code than be taught by someone they may not respect all that much. They're almost certainly capable of determining for themselves what they need to learn in order to do their job. If they can't do their job, thats where you get involved.

I had a manager once, this guy who was incredibly invested in this picture of himself playing this this role as fearless leader, cool startup guy, and all around genius. He went so far as to write down some speeches he later read to us in what I presume were "leadership moments" in his head. He very nearly killed the company, and every single member of the tech team left before it was done. Don't be this guy.

There's a book by Dale Carnegie called "How to Win Friends and Influence People". Recommended.

> I FEEL THEY DON'T LIKE ME

Your post is almost entirely about you. Do you only talk about you at work? It might explain a bit.

What are your team members actually like? Their personalities, interpersonal conflicts, aspirations, successes, strengths, weaknesses?

I don't know either you or them, but the fact that you have asked us all for help and told us almost nothing about them suggests (to me - I may well be wrong or biased) that you are not spending enough time getting know them. I expected you to tell us specific situations that would lead them to not like you, but you seem not to know any. I doubt they would be short of reasons if we asked them. It's rare to find anyone who dislikes people for no reason.

For me, a team lead's role is not coding. You are there to assemble, manage and grow the team that will do the coding. Maybe that involves doing some of the code (more likely the code reviews) yourself, but maybe not. Your real role is the people management and that involves a deep understanding of who these people are and what motivates them. If you are trying to stuff engineering knowledge down their throats when what they really want is autonomy (for example), then it's unlikely they will warm to you.

I would recommend approaching this as a completely new skill, which is as hard to learn as coding was. Some people build their careers entirely on being able to manage and grow teams. It's worth noting that these people tend to get paid more than the developers they manage :)

Sorry I can offer much more insight, but there's not a lot to go on. I hope things improve for you.