The article started well, but degenerated into a laundry list. A list that contains everything is barely helpful.
Lets not criticize the list for being too good. Choose the subset you like and enjoy. :)
Effective Technical Leadership
11–20 of 20 posts
Re: Effective Technical Leadership
#12Fantastic article. Reading it felt like I was reading a guide on how to become a better coder. Sidenote: I'm sure to want to reread this in the future. What terrifies me about Medium is that if I'm flipping through my notes, say 5 or 10 years from now, will this link still work?
Yes. It will.
Re: Effective Technical Leadership
#13Good differentiation between leadership and management. Reminds me of some very good HBR articles on that difference, and the need for putting leadership before management in any organization.
Re: Effective Technical Leadership
#14The point about prioritizing clearing road-blocks for your team cannot be underestimated, but, in my experience, with a serious caveat: - Unless your SURE you have the time, do not put the technical task onto yourself, try to redirect. I've made that blunder over and over again: saying "heh, I'll hack this little bit up tomorrow", and in the middle of planning, helping other people and so forth you postpone, losing t…
I can't upvote you more than once, so I'll add an "amen" and a personal experience. A while back a company where I'd been doing contract web dev work had a dual account/project management role come open and offered it to me. I'd done some client-facing work for them before and freelancing on my own, so I thought "How hard could it be?" Two things I didn't know when I said yes: * how much work there was for the small…
Pg referred to this as Maker schedule and manager schedule
http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
It's true all over
Re: Effective Technical Leadership
#15The point about prioritizing clearing road-blocks for your team cannot be underestimated, but, in my experience, with a serious caveat: - Unless your SURE you have the time, do not put the technical task onto yourself, try to redirect. I've made that blunder over and over again: saying "heh, I'll hack this little bit up tomorrow", and in the middle of planning, helping other people and so forth you postpone, losing t…
Yes - always good advice for Project Managers as well. Never put yourself on the critical path.
Re: Effective Technical Leadership
#16Fantastic article. Reading it felt like I was reading a guide on how to become a better coder. Sidenote: I'm sure to want to reread this in the future. What terrifies me about Medium is that if I'm flipping through my notes, say 5 or 10 years from now, will this link still work?
Add it to Pocket.
Re: Effective Technical Leadership
#17I'd like to differ slightly: the job of a good tech lead is to be an effective first among equals. If you're working on a talented team, there should be no presupposition that the tech lead is necessarily the best developer on it. But you should be good enough to break ties and set direction. I've worked on a lot of teams with talented developers who aren't especially interested in leadership, or former leads who've…
My own take on it is different again - as far as I see it the job of technical lead on a project is take ensure that the right technical decisions get made and to ultimately take responsibility for those decisions. Yes, I could directly override people and tell them to do things - but if I ever did that then IMHO I would have failed.
A lot of my job is asking questions, making suggestions and proving (when necessary) that something can actually be done. [I love it when someone utters a phrase starting "There is no way to...."]
Re: Effective Technical Leadership
#18This list covers a lot of good ground, one of the smaller but i think important points is this: "simplify". It's part of your job as a tech lead to show your team a simpler route. Simple code reduces complexity, which makes maintenance easier, and can get you to your goal faster. A lot of new to intermediate guys will over engineer a small piece (and i mean that literally, for some reason i've never had the experience of women over engineering code).
Re: Effective Technical Leadership
#19Very helpful for anyone looking to hire such a person too - almost a checklist of things to ask them about from their experience.
Re: Effective Technical Leadership
#20This list covers a lot of good ground, one of the smaller but i think important points is this: "simplify". It's part of your job as a tech lead to show your team a simpler route. Simple code reduces complexity, which makes maintenance easier, and can get you to your goal faster. A lot of new to intermediate guys will over engineer a small piece (and i mean that literally, for some reason i've never had the experienc…
I think I've seen more aimlessness than overengineering, but otherwise, yes. Simple sometimes takes a second look, and a willingness to edit during that look.