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I'm a Tech Lead, and nobody listens to me. What should I do?

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Re: I'm a Tech Lead, and nobody listens to me. What should I do?

#61

Post by nickdothutton »

wiseowise wrote: post #56
general1465 wrote: post #30

I still remember when my previous employer has lost domain for like 3 months. Boss and his business partner have setup company and I have joined later. Business partner left. - I was trying to figure out who have access to domain X? It is not on AWS and by whois it is under some random registrar in Europe. I got just shrug from boss. Everything works so why bother? - After 3 years of scratching my head and try to rep…

This, many times this. If you encounter pushback from everywhere – leave, don’t spend your life energy fighting bullshit.

I won't add much, but if this happens you must leave. Raise the risk. Document it. Document your recommendation and their decision, even if not replying or not making a decision was their decision. Tie it up with a bow on it, keep a copy, and leave.

Re: I'm a Tech Lead, and nobody listens to me. What should I do?

#63

Post by maddmann »

master-lincoln wrote: post #18
socketcluster wrote: post #15

I've been tech lead at different companies. Every time I switched companies, I started out as senior dev and got promoted into the team lead role again; each time with full support of my team. I don't look or act like a leader and this has been a hurdle for me. But what typically happens anyway is; within a few months, my code ends up being a core part of the project; my modules become heavily depended upon and someh…

I don't understand why that is a logical progression. Writing good code and leading a team needs vastly different skill-sets in my eyes.

I was thinking the same thing. Sounds more like staff engineer not team lead/mgmt?

Re: I'm a Tech Lead, and nobody listens to me. What should I do?

#64

Post by humanfromearth9 »

tormeh wrote: post #11
fredsted wrote: post #5

> After that incident, I created an incident review document and suggested a small review of the tasks that should be prioritized to prevent it from happening again. I got carried away and created an initial presentation for the other backend Chapter Leads with a backend strategy. I do not remember it perfectly, but it included hexagonal architecture, a testing pyramid with contract tests to avoid breaking APIs used…

> hexagonal architecture God help me. Was on a project where this was used to justify so much extra boilerplate. Every class had an interface, and then we used dependency injection to supply the class to something expecting that interface. Actually, it was in Rust, so there were no classes, but that didn't stop us. Absolute waste of time.

Interfaces are only necessary to properly abstract away from implementation details that have different change driver assignments. Else it's overkill and arbitrary. This doesn't invalidate hexagonal architecture, it just provides the actual good guideline to know if abstractions and information hiding are necessary.

Check the Independent Variation Principle paper for more info: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17677316

The IVP provides two directives that help evaluating objectively design options, based on actual business decisional authority structure, not some guy's intuition. With the insights of the IVP, you'll be able to decide effectively.

The paper is long, but you can skip to the parts that you find interesting

Re: I'm a Tech Lead, and nobody listens to me. What should I do?

#65

Post by OutOfHere »

jmkni wrote: post #7

If nobody is listening to you then you aren't a tech lead, just saying

This. If the lead has no power to suspend people without pay, or to fire people, then he is not a lead. It's okay for this power to be indirect so long as it can be wielded when necessary.

Re: I'm a Tech Lead, and nobody listens to me. What should I do?

#66

Post by tormeh »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #48
tormeh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know much about C#, but in Rust this is very much not the norm. In fact, there are technical limitations associated with async traits. This sometimes allowed us a reprieve from the madness, but only sometimes. I guess you can write enterprise Java in any language. The entire idea was to make it easier to mock components and therefore easier to test code, however all the code connecting the components became u…

The easiest thing to test will always be pure functions. Many people don't realize this, and how clean it can make your tests look. Provide input, get return value, assert/check it. Sure, at the end of the day you have some IO somewhere. But that will usually be a smaller part of the code base. Codebases that make testing more difficult than that, are making it unnecessarily complicated. Sometimes you depend on some…

Exactly. Divide the code in impure and pure functions. The pure functions can be easily unit tested. The impure ones can often be integration tested. The rest you'll just have to live with (or cover with whole-process integration tests). For tests spanning larger chunks of your code base it might be worth it to mock impure code. Never mock pure code - that's madness.

Re: I'm a Tech Lead, and nobody listens to me. What should I do?

#67

Post by kamaal »

general1465 wrote: post #30

I still remember when my previous employer has lost domain for like 3 months. Boss and his business partner have setup company and I have joined later. Business partner left. - I was trying to figure out who have access to domain X? It is not on AWS and by whois it is under some random registrar in Europe. I got just shrug from boss. Everything works so why bother? - After 3 years of scratching my head and try to rep…

>>If top is bunch of sloppy clowns, whole company is going to be the same.

This happens so often at big companies as well. Management is always assumed to be correct, and the pay grade argument always kicks in(They are paid more because you are beneath them). And this starts to show up everywhere. You can't take any initiative without sanction from the top, and they are often clueless as to what the ask is. Most of the times its rejected just to assert authority, and not on the grounds of merit.

Top bosses are also very envious and proactively trying to kill rising talent out of fear- people better than them, will replace them. To that end no good thing ever happens, if you push too hard you will be eliminated in interest of self preservation.

So by and large no good thing is ever suggested, or tried or happens. Eventually until whole business(es) die out. This happens in every company, no matter what companies claim about hiring, retaining and promoting talent. This is just how every place works.

Re: I'm a Tech Lead, and nobody listens to me. What should I do?

#68

Post by tormeh »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #40
tormeh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know much about C#, but in Rust this is very much not the norm. In fact, there are technical limitations associated with async traits. This sometimes allowed us a reprieve from the madness, but only sometimes. I guess you can write enterprise Java in any language. The entire idea was to make it easier to mock components and therefore easier to test code, however all the code connecting the components became u…

What is the default way in Rust to write REST endpoints and have the REST endpoint use/create handles to your database transaction that is bound in scope to the underlying HTTP request? (i.e. transaction lifetime and commit/rollback is linked to the HTTP request succeeding)

Often each API route will have its own handler function. That function will - usually through many layers of indirection and abstraction - launch queries towards your database.

Re: I'm a Tech Lead, and nobody listens to me. What should I do?

#69

Post by azangru »

commandersaki wrote: post #9

That Spotify squad tribe diagram makes me want to vomit.

What's wrong with it? Squads look like regular small teams. Tribes look like several teams working on the same product and having to coordinate their work. Each team has specialists, who like to hang out together and talk shop, forming different "chapters". The number of product owners and agile coaches might be excessive :-) But other than that, what's so bad about it?

Re: I'm a Tech Lead, and nobody listens to me. What should I do?

#70

Post by arealaccount »

I find tech leads to be the most difficult people in any organization to work with (always with exceptions), I think it’s because they are still learning the lead part, and at the same time are trying to prove themselves.

Coming in with a hexagonal overhaul is a great example. At least in this case it seems the writer didn’t dig his heals in too much.

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