The Effective Tech Lead Is a 100x Engineer

Well, we do employ "true" managers (if by true you mean "people" managers), too. There are two types of managers in our org: people managers and technical managers. Tech Leads are the interface between product and engineering. Engineering Managers are the interface between Engineers and Webflow/life/career/support/advocacy. Tech leads do have to possess some people skills, too, but their technical expertise makes them key for playing that role and for setting expectations. That said, they can improve their people managements skills as well, which gives them a glimpse into if they might enjoy moving into Engineering Management.

> How do you deal with the fact that most developers do not like management?

The role is completely optional. It's a "hat" that our engineers pass around when someone wants to improve in that area or wants to create momentum in something they believe in. Once a project is over, the Lead can simply take the hat off if they do so choose. It's our job to make the role so enticing that they _want_ to pursue it. That's tricky, but that's why we write these kinds of guides. :)

> Have you ever had a Tech Lead who didn't want to actually manage other devs, but just liked having extra authority and access to stakeholders?

We've normalized the Engineering, Tech Lead, and Engineering Manager hierarchy. Each have specific roles and responsibilities, but they are all considered the same level, and have relatively the same access to stakeholders and possess the same authority in their respective domains. We want someone to take on the Tech Lead role because _they_ want to, not because it's a power grab.

> What do you do, then?

If that were to happen, however, we'd likely encourage the behaviors we wished to see by also demonstrating those behaviors ourselves. We try and remove the "power" incentive from the equation, and instead reward the role for being a force multiplier. This is a trick I picked up from some of the amazing managers at NoRedInk. (thanks Josh Leven!)

I've found the key to being an effective tech lead is to look at the team as an extension of yourself. As a senior engineer there is only so much you can do. Given the right team, you can do much more. This requires you do the planning and specifications, and occasionally pick off the difficult task. However, you must balance your engineering time against the productivity of the team.

My number one goal as a lead is always for my team to come in and work without interruption. Everything they need to complete a task should be in the task management software. This is what I want as a dev, and so is what I aim to provide for my devs. This doesn't mean writing all the specs myself. Give the devs enough info to write their own tasks and review them before they start. This is manageable up to about 6 people. If you have a bigger team, then you need sub-leads to spread the load.

Or, to be glib, you now program programmers, and so code in the highest level programming language of all.

> I like to think we are all 10x developers

Well, that's why the author had to call tech leads "100x developers". x inflation has led us to this situation where 10x is now a baseline minimum. Anything under 100x is just mediocre.

I've been a tech lead in the past and am currently a tech lead for a 1-man project. I agree with the sentiments here: if you're contributing a significant amount of code then you're probably failing the rest of the team in some way.

It's hard to be on top of everyone else's work, the architecture, the weekly planning and the external team syncs while also trying to write features.

Being alone, I'm basically taking shortcuts to get results until I have more bandwidth or get a team member to help shore things up. The goals and deadlines were set way above my head so unfortunately outcomes are prioritized as it stands.