We don't need a Tech Lead • Hacker News Board

Re: We don't need a Tech Lead

#51

Post by hyperbole » Fri, Dec 02, 2016, 3:20 PM UTC

What is your definition of a 'team', is it a 2 pizza scrum team, is it your PD organization? In the real world team members have varying levels of context & product understanding - a tech lead should be the person with a firm enough grasp of a functional area to help make a decision, and that person doesn't always need to be a member of the team, nor is it true that the tech lead needs to make the decision because normally decisions are a collection of trade-offs - and the role should be to guide the team to the correct one, i.e. we were thinking of doing this, response: if you do that did you think of this consequence, or perhaps you should consider doing this instead...

Here in the real world its various shades of gray on most of these points mentioned - if you don't have a lead role what do your junior engineers aspire to be the architect for which you have a handful of - or perhaps they're just looking for a job elsewhere.

Re: We don't need a Tech Lead

#52

Post by mnsc » Fri, Dec 02, 2016, 3:22 PM UTC

matwood wrote: post #28

mnsc wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Senior does not automatically imply confident. I'm most senior in my team but in certain areas I have to admit I'm not confident enough to make a sane choice. If a junior developer that is confident in a solution can't be able to lead in that decision, the team is dysfunctional as stated in the article.

It's not about a junior person leading in the decision, it is about deciding between competing solutions. As the senior person you should see the bigger picture beyond the current problem solution even if it's an area your unfamiliar with. The people proposing the solution need to convince you that their solution is the one to go with. A good lead will listen to all sides, and explain how a decision is being made. Th…

Sounds like a "Tech Lead" that is a skilled mediator that gets the whole team onboard the right decision and at the same time a skilled coach that can explain the relevant part of the bigger picture to the juniors and how it relates to the decision at hand.

My takeaway from the article is that these two roles in a well functioning team can be two people and also different people depending on the problem.

Re: We don't need a Tech Lead

#53

Post by bargl » Fri, Dec 02, 2016, 3:24 PM UTC

As a Tech Lead on my current project I see my role as that of the mediator many times. But something interesting I've found in my current role is that I have to extract opinions from my team. They are great developers but they are quiet so I have to pull them aside and get their feedback. I have to let them know why we are doing what we are doing.

I'd argue that a great Tech Lead (which I am not) encourages his team to work together better all while guiding them around common project pitfalls so that they don't make massive mistakes in direction. He also needs to be able to make every voice on his team heard. This has been really hard for me, and every time someone expresses an opinion contrary to mine I end up having to stop my knee jerk reaction to shoot them down. Because my team needs differing opinions.

I think my biggest personal win has been getting one of our quiet developers who doesn't have the best grasp of English to speak more and feel respected (I hope).

To be fully up front my team is 100% contract developers other than me, so I also have to let them know that I personally do not see them as contractors. They have just as much buy in to this project. If they don't like the design, I'll listen and we can discuss it as a team as long as there is a proposed alternative.

Re: We don't need a Tech Lead

#54

Post by clairity » Fri, Dec 02, 2016, 3:28 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #16

zaphar wrote: post #2

I don't know that I fully agree with this. I think in even well functioning teams you need at least one person who is empowered to make the call. In the cases of a disagreement deadlock you need someone to break the deadlock. Whether that person is a called a Tech Lead or something else you still need them and they need authority and freedom to make the call. Maybe his Mediator can be that person but if you give the…

A well functioning team makes all decisions by consensus, so there are no deadlocks. There are certainly disagreements, but they are hashed out in a timely fashion in well functioning teams. That doesn't mean necessarily that everybody completely agrees with everything, but it does mean that members recognize when to defer rather than stall. If you have deadlocks, it's not a well functioning team.

> A well functioning team makes all decisions by consensus, so there are no deadlocks.

no, a well-functioning team empowers and trusts each member to make good decisions independently. those teams also foster psychological safety so that team members don't feel timid for fear of making a mistake. often there is an orchestrator who guides the team by making the more strategic decisions.

a good basketball team exemplifies this. on the san antonio spurs, tony parker, their point guard, makes strategic decisions but every player makes many independent decisions that help the team win together. you can tell they trust each others' decisions and they support esch other through mistakes.

Re: We don't need a Tech Lead

#55

Post by 1_2__3 » Fri, Dec 02, 2016, 3:29 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #16

zaphar wrote: post #2

I don't know that I fully agree with this. I think in even well functioning teams you need at least one person who is empowered to make the call. In the cases of a disagreement deadlock you need someone to break the deadlock. Whether that person is a called a Tech Lead or something else you still need them and they need authority and freedom to make the call. Maybe his Mediator can be that person but if you give the…

A well functioning team makes all decisions by consensus, so there are no deadlocks. There are certainly disagreements, but they are hashed out in a timely fashion in well functioning teams. That doesn't mean necessarily that everybody completely agrees with everything, but it does mean that members recognize when to defer rather than stall. If you have deadlocks, it's not a well functioning team.

You are as wrong as wrong can be.

Re: We don't need a Tech Lead

#56

Post by zaphar » Fri, Dec 02, 2016, 3:32 PM UTC

mnsc wrote: post #49

zaphar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The risk you take on when the mediator role doesn't have practical experience is that no consensus will be reached. Or worse if that mediator is empowered to break a deadlock he'll do so badly because he doesn't have enough context to make a good decision and not enough time to come up to speed in order to make a good decision.

My point is that the mediator shouldn't make the decision that is not in the role. If the deadlock is concerning i.e. two competing architectural decisions the mediator should help the different people with architect roles engaged in the debate to decide how to move forward. Trusting that a single Tech Lead always will have the right context to authoritatively decide the best way forward seems naive to me. Where is t…

The same place you find two people who can by consensus arrive at the best decision moving forward. The point of breaking a deadlock isn't that you choose the best choice but that you are able to make a choice which is strictly better than making no choice.

Re: We don't need a Tech Lead

#57

Post by brandall10 » Fri, Dec 02, 2016, 3:35 PM UTC

zaphar wrote: post #2

I don't know that I fully agree with this. I think in even well functioning teams you need at least one person who is empowered to make the call. In the cases of a disagreement deadlock you need someone to break the deadlock. Whether that person is a called a Tech Lead or something else you still need them and they need authority and freedom to make the call. Maybe his Mediator can be that person but if you give the…

I don't agree with it either.

Case in point - I've been in a situation as detailed toward the end of the article where all the devs on the team were feature leads, except we still had a designated overall lead. Just 4 devs on the team, all of us were very sr (principal or sr. principal devs). But the overall number of stakeholders in the product were probably well over 30 people, so it was still a big coordination effort.

It was for a fairly large legacy enterprise healthcare product ($200M per annum revenue). Each big feature had its own core team with other stakeholders in the company -- usually these meetings would be with a half dozen other people. The main core team for the overall product had about 20 members. Each feature had its own requirements/design documents (usually 30+ pages each). The main requirements/design docs would sorta be like a high-level index linking to these sub documents.

It was a waterfall process of course, and once the designs were mostly there the entire team would work on all the features together. The team lead would assign what people would be working on at any given time, but beyond that the feature leads would break down and delegate the overall work based on who was working on their feature. Typically each feature would be worked on by 2 people at a time and sometimes 3.

The team lead wasn't actually the strongest dev, he just had the best 'leadership skills'. He was the one our manager trusted most and generally spoke to about overall project health and deadlines. He was the one who cleared pathways with other teams/resources (ie. ensured QA was on target to line up an availability window, how many engineers they could provide, etc).

I don't see any points in the article that really argue against having a designated lead, and I think it's always a weird idea that a team lead (note I don't say 'tech' lead) is seen as anything but a manager who still codes. It's not an architect, the strongest dev, etc. It's a person with a best management/leadership skills with perhaps a solid high-level grasp of the domain. In a small team/product yes it can just be just the strongest dev, naturally rising up. But in these situations I've seen usually the key is there are not too many overall stakeholders... say a team of 2-3 devs with less than 10 people involved overall.

Re: We don't need a Tech Lead

#58

Post by crdoconnor » Fri, Dec 02, 2016, 3:42 PM UTC

zaphar wrote: post #2

I don't know that I fully agree with this. I think in even well functioning teams you need at least one person who is empowered to make the call. In the cases of a disagreement deadlock you need someone to break the deadlock. Whether that person is a called a Tech Lead or something else you still need them and they need authority and freedom to make the call. Maybe his Mediator can be that person but if you give the…

I don't know that I fully agree with you. I've seen some "deadlock breaking" where necessary discussions were cut short by, like, 5 or 10 minutes and the resulting "compromise" architectural decisions ended up being disastrous.

I've also seen team leads set agendas and drive discussion in such a way as to bury important issues that would otherwise come out while wasting time on minutiae.

In contrast I've never really seen one of these fabled technical arguments over tabs vs. spaces that lasted 4 hours and wasted everybody's time. If nothing else, sheer boredom prevents discussions from going on longer than they have to.

Re: We don't need a Tech Lead

#59

Post by Pica_soO » Fri, Dec 02, 2016, 3:43 PM UTC

I sometimes wonder, if some Potemkin Tech Lead- all fraud, but scaring the shit out of the big ones, would be good. Sort of challenger in the ring, who constantly keeps the tech giants fighting, afraid to loose there markets.

Of course, such a scam, to make it feel real, they would to have a product at some stage.

Re: We don't need a Tech Lead

#60

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Dec 02, 2016, 3:44 PM UTC

mnsc wrote: post #50

ep103 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the only thing I was thinking this entire article. I'm a dev lead. If I had an entire team of my great engineers, my job would be easy. I'd simply delegate my duties to everyone else, and we'd all be nearly equal. The reality is I have 2 junior people who need to be guidanced through everything. I have one moderately experienced guy who just wants to be left alone to solve bugs on his own, in quiet isolation.…

Hey, quit!

[deleted]