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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?

#111

Post by ericmcer »

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.

It is annoying when it is dogmatically followed, but for certain things it makes sense to have a generic interface between your business logic and specific library/service code.

Being all or nothing with it can be tedious though. Like if you are using Postgres... you probably don't need have abstracted adapters that makes it easier to run on some other DB later.

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

#112

Post by ericmcer »

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.

It is a good way to burn out high performers haha.

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

#113

Post by msdz »

franktankbank wrote: post #99
zenethian wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems kind of childish to be honest. Why not just fire the person?

Psychotic IMO. We will fire you but only after you've been publicly humiliated? Who thinks to do this kind of shit?

As has been stated above, I’m guessing in this specific example it would’ve been due to the rather strict labor laws, which I’m not going to comment my opinion on, just to clarify/explain: Here (Germany), you can basically not fire someone if your company has >10 full-time employees, and they’re not actively misbehaving (or under trainee/probationary status). Yep, this statement means exactly what it reads.

So I’m guessing that’s the reason for this “passive firing” method.

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

#114

Post by mixmastamyk »

Doesn’t only apply to leads, any new employee faces the same dynamics. Honestly it takes a while to understand not just what is broken at a company, but more importantly why. Otherwise the obvious fix might be a band-aid.

Reminds me of an old post by Joel, “fixing things when you’re a grunt.” His advice was similar.

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

#115

Post by ffsm8 »

MangoToupe wrote: post #72
zelphirkalt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But that will usually be a smaller part of the code base. Testing how IO composes makes up most of what you want to test because it's such a difficult problem. Reasoning about this in terms of size of the codebase doesn't make sense.

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 solved.

The only difficulty is the "interesting" architecture decisions people like the OP introduce, making inherently trivial problems into multi week endeavors which need coordination between dozens if not hundreds of devs

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

#116

Post by MangoToupe »

ffsm8 wrote: post #115
MangoToupe wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But that will usually be a smaller part of the code base. Testing how IO composes makes up most of what you want to test because it's such a difficult problem. Reasoning about this in terms of size of the codebase doesn't make sense.

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!

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

#117

Post by mixmastamyk »

ionwake wrote: post #86
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that's how Silicon Valley works?

It sounds like he is implying something, as in everyone switches jobs, but he specifically points out he changes jobs after being promoted, which I assume he did for a reason. But I cant tell if its because he was unhappy and for what reason. Otherwise why would he specifically point that out?

If you’ve been in the game a few decades, you’ll have changed jobs for all sorts of reasons. Mostly not relevant.

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

#118

Post by mixmastamyk »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #35
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…

As the other commenters stated, it is not clear what is the point. Writing good code and being a tech leader are very different positions with very different technical skills. I was a tech lead in a few cases (different companies or different departments of a very large company) and I was not the top developer there, my job was not to be one. I worked with developers that were much better than me that were not a good…

I took it as good, central contributions are one path to respect and trust.

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

#119

Post by Bratmon »

zenethian wrote: post #97
braza wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's some low-risk/consequence project/initiative that is designed to receive people that will be fired due to lack of compliance and/or collaboration with the new management. Once we had a German colleague that was not so collaborative in sharing the knowledge about some specific parts of the application, and the Tech lead replaced her MacBook with a Windows 10, and she only can write PRs related with DocStrings.

This seems kind of childish to be honest. Why not just fire the person?

Because firing people in Germany is a multi-year process that requires (among many other things) paying for a complete training course in all job-relevant skills under the assumption that any incompetence is caused by insufficient training.

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

#120

Post by QuantumGood »

braza wrote: post #76
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…

> 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…

What you say and what they think are not the same, usually your meaning and intention is drowned out by their pre-existing assumptions and incentives/motivations. You have to resonate with their assumptions and incentives for them to "hear" your meaning and intention.
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