Technical lead here: This is a tough position to have. I can't comment on the post but feel free to email me if you want to rant, vent, or talk. :)
Ask HN: How do I deal with my engineering team and motivate myself?
21–30 of 50 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do I deal with my engineering team and motivate myself?
#22[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How do I deal with my engineering team and motivate myself?
#23Engineers 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.
"What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure - as a mere automaton of duty?"
Re: Ask HN: How do I deal with my engineering team and motivate myself?
#24> 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…
>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.
I know it depends on the organization (and possibly the size of it) but I was always given the impression that team leads are generally expected to provide leadership (sometimes only technical) and do a fair portion of the work as well. Usually a manager would deal with the people stuff and a PM would deal with the project related things. But I've only worked with a few team leads so my experience may not be the norm.
Re: Ask HN: How do I deal with my engineering team and motivate myself?
#25> 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…
>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. I know it depends on the organization (and possibly the size of it) but I was always given the impression that team leads are generally expected to provide leadership (sometimes only technical) and do a fair portion of the work as well. Usually a manager would deal with the people stuff and a PM wou…
Yeah, to me a Team Lead is the programmer that gets called to meetings. Not a people manager. It varies between organizations, I'm sure.
Re: Ask HN: How do I deal with my engineering team and motivate myself?
#26It sounds like you haven't given up your ownership of the code. If you're leading a team of 8-12 people and don't have time to do any coding by yourself, you no longer own the code, your team does. You are going to have to let go of your personal coding responsibilities and understand that there are always multiple solutions to problems. The solution members of your team use may differ from the solutions you would have chosen AND THAT'S OK. The most you should be doing is architecting a general solution for projects but leaving the actual implementation to your team. Depending on the complexity of these projects, your time may be better spent documenting/diagramming processes, improving specs/requirements.
Re: Ask HN: How do I deal with my engineering team and motivate myself?
#27The might not like you, OR you might be predisposed to think that of people.
Do you perceive yourself as liked in general, and these latest jobs are the exception? What's the concrete evidence, if any, of this attitude?
Re: Ask HN: How do I deal with my engineering team and motivate myself?
#28[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How do I deal with my engineering team and motivate myself?
#29> And I keep pushing my team to learn new stuff and educate them whatever I learn. This is likely a big part of the issue. You can't make them learn. > Just to let you know I constantly keep asking for feedback from my Reporting managers and my team and keep on improving. Wow. Chill out. No need to harangue people to get your job done. I'd say to adopt the role of team "anthropologist" and spend some time with them j…
>This is likely a big part of the issue. You can't make them learn.
This is one I struggle with a lot. I love learning and if someone shows me something new I think they're awesome. Almost no one is like this. Most people don't give a shit about learning and just want to do what they've been comfortable doing for years before you came along and "messed everything up" by trying to create some progress in the way stuff is done.
Re: Ask HN: How do I deal with my engineering team and motivate myself?
#30> 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 yo…
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