On Becoming a Tech Lead

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Tech lead sounds like a lot of work. And not the fun coding kind either. Why would you ever want that? What does it feel like when you get it?

In this talk Swizec explains why he took the step towards technical leadership, how his priorities changed, and why it means he’s doing more engineering than ever. A whole new world where writing code is the easy part.


This talk has been presented at TechLead Conference 2023, check out the latest edition of this Tech Conference.

FAQ

A Tech Lead is a role that varies between companies, often considered a type of staff engineer or a stepping stone towards it. Tech Leads are responsible for managing the technical direction of a team without direct people management responsibilities. Their main focus is on helping the team make good technical decisions and ensuring smooth project flow.

Individuals may want to become a Tech Lead for various reasons. For some, like Suez, it is because coding becomes the easy part over the years, and they seek more interesting and impactful work. Being a Tech Lead allows them to influence bigger decisions, shape the roadmap, and help the entire team be more effective.

A Tech Lead focuses on the technical leadership track, managing the technical direction of a team, while a Team Lead is often a first step towards the management track, dealing more with people management responsibilities. Some companies may mix these roles, but generally, Tech Leads are more about technical influence and less about direct authority.

Early lessons include being the 'clown' to encourage idea sharing, avoiding the trap of doing all the work yourself, focusing on the outcome rather than the means, and presenting a front of certainty to the team even when unsure.

A Tech Lead should focus on doing less and letting the team struggle and find solutions independently. They should avoid trying to do everyone's work, instead enable the team to shine by delegating tasks and providing guidance only when necessary.

While Senior Engineers may focus more on direct coding tasks, a Tech Lead focuses more on engineering—breaking down problems, planning, and ensuring the team works on the right projects. They do more of the high-level planning and less of the actual coding.

Force multiplying refers to the Tech Lead's role in amplifying the team's productivity and effectiveness. It means helping the team make better technical decisions, smoothing project flow, and ultimately increasing the overall output and success of the team.

A Tech Lead is involved in shaping the roadmap and making high-level decisions early in the project lifecycle. They help determine what projects are feasible, prioritize tasks, and ensure that the team works on the most important and impactful tasks.

Engineering involves solving fuzzy problems and creating solutions, often abstractly, while coding is the implementation part of those solutions. Engineering may involve planning and designing systems on a whiteboard, whereas coding is about writing the actual code.

Even if a Tech Lead is unsure about decisions, showing certainty helps maintain team confidence and direction. It prevents flip-flopping and ensures that once a decision is made, the team commits to it, fostering a stable and focused work environment.

Swizec Teller
Swizec Teller
25 min
09 Mar, 2023

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Video Summary and Transcription

The role of a Tech Lead involves shaping the roadmap, helping the team be more effective, and working on important projects. Lessons learned include encouraging idea sharing, avoiding taking on all the work, and focusing on delegation. Tech Leads focus on the outcome, involve the team in decision-making, and make plans based on how different pieces will interact. The role of a Tech Lead is to focus on engineering and guide the team in figuring out how the whole system should fit together. Architecting can become problematic when it loses touch with the coding part, resulting in implementation issues.
Available in Español: Sobre convertirse en un Tech Lead

1. Introduction to Tech Lead Role

Short description:

Hi, I'm Suez and I'm going to talk about some lessons learned after becoming a Tech Lead. The role of a Tech Lead varies between companies, but it is often seen as a stepping stone towards becoming a staff engineer. Tech Leads are responsible for managing the technical direction of a team and force multiplying the team's efforts. They have the opportunity to be involved in decision-making and shape the roadmap of projects.

Hi, I'm Suez and I'm going to talk about some lessons learned after becoming a Tech Lead. Why you would even want to be a Tech Lead and what is it that Tech Leads even do?

So first of all, what is a Tech Lead? The definition or the job description of a Tech Lead kind of varies between different companies. Some companies think of this as one type of a staff engineer. Some people think of it as a stepping stone towards becoming a staff engineer.

And you know, the role is supposed to be one of the first or the most common ways of getting into the technical leadership track, which is sort of a parallel track to the management track where a lot of companies these days have a technical track where you go from junior engineer to mid-level engineer to senior engineer and there might be multiple levels of a senior engineer. And then it kind of stops. You can be a senior engineer basically for the rest of your life. It's usually considered a terminal title, which means that once you're a senior software engineer, we trust you to do work independently, to successfully follow business objectives and to get your stuff done.

And then you can go beyond that either on the technical track, which eventually, which goes to staff principal, distinguished engineers, and all of those people. Or you can go on the management track, which is engineering manager, VP, CTO, and that sort of thing. Like I don't know the exact steps. Usually there's a bunch of them between different companies. And where it really gets tricky is this fork in the road where you go from being just a senior engineer, or being a senior engineer towards something more. What is the next step? Often tech lead is the first next step that people take. And if you look at it as a fork in the road, it's usually, tech lead is usually more on side of the technical leadership track, staff, principal, et cetera, and team lead is the first step towards the management track. Some companies mix those two, but that's how it usually works.

The idea of a technical leadership track is that you are not responsible for managing people, at least not directly. You're more responsible for managing the technical direction of a team, especially as a tech. You're usually focused on a specific team, which means that while you're sort of still an individual contributor, your output is now being judged by what the team does as a whole, except that unlike a team lead or a manager, you're not dealing with the people management responsibilities. You don't have any direct authority. It's more about soft influence and directing people and helping, basically helping the team make good technical decisions to make sure that projects flow smoothly, that you're working with your product owner and kind of force multiplying the team. I would say that force multiplying is probably the main thing that tech leads do. Force multiplying is the main thing that tech leads do.

The question that a lot of people ask is, why would you even become a tech lead? What is it that makes somebody want to become a tech lead? Honestly, it varies between individuals, but for me, the main reason I decided to become a tech lead was that after doing this for many years, coding kind of became the easy part. I started looking for more interesting things to do than just banging out code, and one thing I realized while working on a team in a hyper-growth startup is that there is a lot more you can get done if you're not the person banging your hands against the keyboard. You can have a much higher impact, a much bigger contribution if you're helping the entire team get more stuff done and work on the right projects than if you're just the person taking direction and writing code.

And one way of having more of that impact is that as a tech lead, you get to, quote unquote, be in the room where the bigger decisions are made, where product owners and other technical leadership is deciding what is it that this team is going to work on next, what is it we're going to decide is important, what we're going to focus on. If you're in that room, you can help shape the roadmap and you can help with, you know, simple things like, hey, we have these five ideas. Which of these is actually achievable within a certain amount of time? And if you're in that room, as a tech lead, you can say, hey, that would take, I don't know, like maybe a couple of weeks. That one is really easy. That one is really hard.

2. The Role of a Tech Lead

Short description:

Being a tech lead allows you to shape the roadmap, help the team and company be more effective, and work on important projects. It's a different challenge than just working on sliced-up stories. The best tech leads are engineers who prioritize getting the right work done and making a positive impact. Reluctant leadership and a focus on what benefits the company and project are key traits.

So when you get to shape that roadmap, you get to help the entire team and the whole company as a result be more effective and get more done and make sure that you're working on the important things, which means that, you know, you have a bigger impact and that feels nice. It's an interesting different kind of challenge than just getting a sliced up story that's, you know, if you're doing Agile, you get a sliced up story, it tells you exactly what you need to do and you go and you get it done. If you're a tech lead, you get to be there way before those stories are even sliced. Sometimes before even anyone knows what the stories are going to be, you get to be in the room and help people decide what the stories should be, what the projects should be, and then help your team work on those. And I think the, what I'm trying to say basically is that it doesn't really matter how productive you are or how much code you can write if you are working on the wrong kind of project. And what I would say here is that the, I think the best kind of tech leads are the sort of engineers who will even get into leadership if that means that more of the right work gets done and more, more good stuff happens. So, you know, kind of at least I personally take a reluctant leadership approach. And some of the best managers I've worked with were always people who didn't see leadership and being a tech lead or a manager or those higher positions as, oh yes, that's the next step in my career. I got to do it to grow. The best people I've seen who take on that role are the people who will even do that if it means that everything is going to go better for the company and the project.

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Francois Bohyn
3 authors
Renaud Bressant (Head of Product), Nathanael Lamellière (Head of Customer Success and Solution Engineer), Nouha Chhih (Developer Experience Manager) will be looking at the different developer jobs that you can accounter when looking for your next developer role. We'll be explaining the specifics of each role, to help you identify which one could be your next move. We'll also be sharing tips to help you navigate the recruitment process, based on the different roles we interviewed for as recruiters, but also as candidates. This will be more of an Ask Us Anything session, so don't hesitate to share your thoughts and questions during the session.