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

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131–136 of 136 posts

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

#131
post #2

Don't rely on hierarchy. Earn others' trust as you would when you are an equal. Don't expect deference just because of your position. Although hierarchical decision making may be more efficient, it's an unnatural system and anti-social and easily generates animosity. You'd do better to empower your peers instead, and show them you are able to listen to them as well. Just like you would with friends.

No. Never accept responsibility without power. That is a lesson I wish I'd learned much earlier in my life.

This, and use power sparingly.

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

#132
post #69

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?

Too much complexity.

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

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On the other hand, if you want to lead a bunch of engineers, you should know their work very well, otherwise you will have unrealistic ideas about what can get done and how they should do it.

Is this really true that you need managers to understand the domain deeply to manage? You could argue that a manager should have domain experts they can trust in their team to get estimates about time and complexity.

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

#134
post #76

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…

> My take away from this is that you can't change the culture I've seen the culture changing in some special circumstances a couple times in previous companies, and honestly all of them were ugly: 1) Demographic replacement (having more people saying yes and out-vote the legacy employees) 2) Hired guns from the top to the bottom to shake the system (we called in a company those managers "007" because they used to hav…

I’ve seen 3 and 4 in Europe, 5 is the perfect encapsulation of shelving disguised as a sh*it sandwich. 1 and 2 are difficult to pull. YMMV

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

#135
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is though, most of the high level languages have that part "solved" via libraries... Hence lots of people don't see the need to test it, as they expect the library to have sufficiently tested already. That leaves your tests mostly centered around your domain/business logic Personally I'm just doing web api dev/backend atm and have to say that at least in this domain, pretty much everything actually hard is solv…

> Thing is though, most of the high level languages have that part "solved" via libraries... > ... > Personally I'm just doing web api dev/backend atm and have to say that at least in this domain, pretty much everything actually hard is solved. Color me extremely skeptical!

You're skeptical that pretty much all high level languages have various APIs and libraries for almost all common IO tasks such as fileaccess, network requests and sockets, various DB integrations etc pp?

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

#136
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a technical lead, and I often tell my teammates exactly how I want them to implement something. I am not looking over their shoulders at every line of code, but I will tell them plainly that I want an interface, a concrete implementation of the interface that is up to them, and a configuration option for substituting a different concrete type. I don't do this because I don't trust them but because I have differen…

> I often tell my teammates exactly how I want them to implement something. Ugh. I recently found myself working with one of those people. What a horrid experience. We waste days trying to reverse engineer out of him what the business problem actually is, and then, once we finally figure that out, even more going over all the things he failed to consider. Software isn't the technical Olympics. It sole purpose in life…

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