This reads like a person was asked if Tech Leads were necessary, felt the answer was "no", found research to the contrary, and wrote their own counter-argument paper. Do I agree with the premise that tech leads aren't necessary if you have a functional, harmonious team? Sure. But I feel that this paper spent as much time as I did coming to that conclusion, and with just as little consideration of what a tech lead could potentially bring to a team - even one that already works well.
We don't need a Tech Lead
91–100 of 116 posts
Re: We don't need a Tech Lead
#92Earlier 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.…
I'd like to hear more about the senior dev who hates code architecture. Do you have any examples? I still go back and forth on on the value of code architecture, and I think some examples might be enlightening.
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Re: We don't need a Tech Lead
#93Let me summarise all the comments:
1. People who are tech leads feel that there is a need for tech leads. 1. People who are not tech leads feel that there is no need for tech leads.
Re: We don't need a Tech Lead
#94Earlier 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.…
I'd like to hear more about the senior dev who hates code architecture. Do you have any examples? I still go back and forth on on the value of code architecture, and I think some examples might be enlightening.
Not a formal or philosophical thing, he's just used to feature development, and/or working on somewhat isolated things. Building out code on a project wide level, so it can have features built into it, is just a level larger than what he used to be comfortable with, I think. And also, framework building doesn't have ui design component, which is something he enjoys.
Re: We don't need a Tech Lead
#95This article seems to neglect the primary reason a trustworthy tech lead is a good idea: specialized knowledge. A company not needing people with specialized tech knowledge is like a company not needing specialized legal knowledge. You can get along with consultants and common sense in some contexts. In others, you absolutely can get screwed.
Re: We don't need a Tech Lead
#96I'm a tech lead in a large, distributed application. I disagree somewhat, there's a bit of a unicorn reasoning. If teams don't work well, a tech lead's job is to revive culture and confidence which is going to be harder.
My day to day as tech lead is mostly looking at our board and seeing if people's work loads are just fine. Do I provide mentoring? Sure, when I need too. Do I provide architectural guidance? Sure, when we have big stories that require my review. Majority of my time is spent taking care of my team. Is my team doing well? Absolutely. We communicate well and aren't shy to help each other out. But being a tech lead my emphasis is quality and making sure that my team is on track with that.
Re: We don't need a Tech Lead
#97Nah, this is wrong. Management is a discipline in its own right, and teams function better with management. It's not a slight to say that teams need a lead, either. I'm sure that developers can self-organize and use their personal leadership skills to help guide the team, but that isn't optimal. In my experience (as a manager), here's why:
1. First and foremost, it takes time to lead. If I have a 6-8 person dev team, it's far less efficient to spread out the overhead to all of them rather than concentrating it in one person - the lead/manager/whatever.
2. Related to #1, what we really want is to let our best developers... develop. It's my job to keep them out of useless meetings and bureaucracy, and even the smallest of companies have bureaucracy. I deal with the roadblocks, you write code.
3. Management is a discipline in its own right. I have a technical background, but these days I should not ever be the best developer on the team. I have a different set of skills and my job is to use them to enable good devs.
By that same token, I would not expect any developer on my team to be the best manager. The only time I expect that is if the company thinks the best analyst/dev/whatever is logically who shuold be the manager, which is common, and incorrect. The manager is the best leader - if that's also the best dev, then go for it, but it is not automatic that best individual contributor = manager.
4. I've posted this before, but this bleeds into the idea of the "hands on" engineering manager/director. Terrible idea, for all of the reasons above. Pick one role and go with it - if you want a leader and a coach to develop your talent, then get a manager/director. If you want a senior engineer, hire that instead. Or both. But not the same person in both roles.
None of this is to minimize the ability for developers to lead. There are lots of smart developers out there who also have good leadership skills and have made the transition, but none of them are good manager simply because they were good engineers. Consider the reverse, you'd never assume someone can plug in as an engineer simply because they are a good manager, it's absurd. I think it's inefficient to have someone do both, as management and engineering skillsets don't overlap all that much. You need each other, I promise.
Re: We don't need a Tech Lead
#98Anecdote: I've been on more that one team where no leadership emerged, and in fact, leadership type behavior was passively resisted. The reasons for this were many, but essentially it was easier (and I suspect more fun) when individual contributors could do their own thing in their own way, without any concern for the impact on their team members or downstream consumers of the software (help desk, IT, etc.) After all, writing useful log messages, or following a coding convention, or writing an automated test are all tedious and not very interesting compared to coding. These teams (if they can be called that) produced software that had little to no overall design.
Re: We don't need a Tech Lead
#99This article starts with "We don't need a tech lead". Which may be true.
It then veers into "You don't need a tech lead". Which I don't think is true.
I am a greybeard by HN standards. I have worked on teams of highly competent developers where there was no tech lead. They failed badly - the lack of both the design consistency from a single source (a literal 'chief builder') and there being no final arbiter. Disagreements lingered to the extent of, in one case, man overboard. Turns out Architectural Consistency is important.
In my latter days I'm occasionally called upon to 'sort out' what's going wrong in particular businesses, often with developers at the 'less good' end of the spectrum. And I can say that in many of these cases the absence of (or, more usually, the lack of competence in) the technical lead is often the root cause of many of the project ills. It can be as if the entire product is cast adrift on whatever technology and technical debt built up from years past.
There are huge flocks of software engineering that barely know "the web is a thing", let alone how to move the herd in a consistent direction.
So if you have a team that's functional anarchy (or meritocracy, if you prefer) - great! Count yourself lucky.
But it is unusual.
Re: We don't need a Tech Lead
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a counterpoint to that maybe everyone on the team should know who the expert is in any particular area and EVERY member of the team should have adequate communication skills
This is wishful thinking at best, companies require practical thinking because reality is corporate suicide. Not everyone will have great communication skills - and as a team increases in size, this becomes increasingly difficult.
This isn't wishful thinking, I work with a 100% remote dev team and communication skills is one of the top things we screen for when interviewing. I assume other remote teams also value that skill.