Ask HN: How to deal with stress and overspecced responsibility?

Give yourself permission to fail https://keen.io/blog/135255657976/permission-to-fail

This.

For more info on finding and testing exactly these people, read http://a16z.com/2014/07/15/do-you-feel-pressure-or-do-you-ap...

It helped me set my world straight for all the new responsibilities as a tech lead (and I'm not a natural with pressure either, having learned the value of having a slight rough edge the hard way).

For more concentrated pure gold, look here: http://www.defmacro.org/2014/10/03/engman.html

In the end, your best bet as said is great hiring and pushing work away from you, which is hardest when you feel you're still doing and understanding it best yourself. Stop this anyway.

Great guideline from my co-founder: Try to get people 70% as good as you and stop there. Really try to lose as much day-to-day-stuff as possible and try rather to get the right people together and give them good context.

Get some senior people along to proxy all semi-important stuff through them. It's a quick way to get them onboarded to stuff you usually do.

Otherwise: Good luck, you could need a mentor, but it looks like you're alright for now, don't search too hard. Don't be too scared of doing mistakes either, you'll do them anyway.

But do yourself a favor and go get that title upgrade to whatever you need (Tech Lead / Lead Architect) - you'll have to be sure you've got the upper echelon's support to whatever uncomfortable decisions you need to take on the way.

I've been in a similar position as you. Make sure to not run in perpetual crunch mode. If you have to consistently work on weekends or late you are doing it wrong. The stress is bad for your health. Sadly happened to me.

First step is to determine proper team size to do the job. Next bring in a few key teams members who you can trust to get things done. Start delegating stuff. However try not to delegate the understanding of the overall project. You should have a good pulse of how things are progressing without polling people. That mean being in code reviews, reviewing commits, etc.

Have all these changes made you happier? We all love status, having influence, etc., but are you actually enjoying work more than when you were coding? Many times the status comes with so many strings (and responsibilities, and headaches) attached that it doesn't really improve our lives at all.

There are a number of good suggestions here about how to make the best of what you're doing; My suggestion is to look closely at how the job feels while you're doing it (as opposed to how it feels when you're telling people about your role). You may find that being a senior engineer or architect minus the planning, tracking and administrating makes for a better work-life.

I know I did.

Somewhat related. Often I leave the office, to do nothing. Walking, talking with people etc. And after those 10-15min when I do come back I usually have a solution for the problem I was working on. It might seem to outsider, or even for myself that Im just slacking off, not really trying to get the problem solved fast, but in practice it saves time.