I love the feedback that you got from your mentor. It wasn't even that harsh, IMO! 😃
I guess this urge to dictate the technical sides happens because all Tech Leads were engineers at some point, and you have a pretty solid idea of how things should be built.
Of course, this doesn't justify telling other people what to do because you not only hinder their development but might also miss out on some great ideas they would have come up with without direction.
I had several occasions throughout my career where I learned stuff from beginner developers when I didn’t tell them exactly what to do!
Hahaha, the "harshness" is due who it came from, not my mentor. But, one of the teammates who was second in line to get the TL role.
I agree with the innovation PoV and how TLs can ruin it for others without even realizing in most cases. What has been your strategy to stay quite even when you have strong opinions on the subject? Or, have you worked with an experienced TL who still do it and how would you share this feedback?
I haven’t worked in many companies in general and spent most of my time freelancing where I had the freedom (and obligation) to come up with solutions. So probably that’s why I had less of these situations. I’m just getting back to the good old 9-5 and I’m sure I’ll run into this. :) thanks for sharing your experience Akash!
+1 to this. As an IC myself and a mentor to 2 interns, this article gives some good ideas on helping those who seek help from you grow. I think one more thing that I found useful is also highlighting ways your reports can make their insights/learnings/ideas more visible (eg: in the example with OOM error, I think a phrasing after the investigation/thread like "thanks for investigating. Let's share this in retro/team meeting and brainstorm as a team next steps" or "lets write a brief investigation doc about this and share with the team for their comments" would be a way to take one step further)
Give the fish or give the fishing rod and teach how to fish yourself. It's faster to give the solution, but it won't scale.
Thanks for the mention here, Akash!
Exactly, it doesn't scale; but TLs are good at solving problems and the new ones wants to do it all.
I love the feedback that you got from your mentor. It wasn't even that harsh, IMO! 😃
I guess this urge to dictate the technical sides happens because all Tech Leads were engineers at some point, and you have a pretty solid idea of how things should be built.
Of course, this doesn't justify telling other people what to do because you not only hinder their development but might also miss out on some great ideas they would have come up with without direction.
I had several occasions throughout my career where I learned stuff from beginner developers when I didn’t tell them exactly what to do!
Hahaha, the "harshness" is due who it came from, not my mentor. But, one of the teammates who was second in line to get the TL role.
I agree with the innovation PoV and how TLs can ruin it for others without even realizing in most cases. What has been your strategy to stay quite even when you have strong opinions on the subject? Or, have you worked with an experienced TL who still do it and how would you share this feedback?
When I was a lead I came to the realisation that allowing people to mess things up is pretty much the only way to let them grow into Leads.
Fortunately I haven’t worked with TL who were rigid on implementation details but tbh I don’t know how I’d tell them :D
Looks like you got lucky. I work closely with multiple TLs now, and one of them just can’t let it go.
I’ve shared this feedback multiple times, yet, they’re always trying to be “helpful”.
I haven’t worked in many companies in general and spent most of my time freelancing where I had the freedom (and obligation) to come up with solutions. So probably that’s why I had less of these situations. I’m just getting back to the good old 9-5 and I’m sure I’ll run into this. :) thanks for sharing your experience Akash!
Sounds like you have been fortunate to be your own boss. I'm sure you'll handle such situations much better, glad you liked this story.
Great post! I have made some of these mistakes and paid heavily in time and effort. Thanks for the reminder Akash!
Same has happened to me, then I’ve met some very experienced person going the extreme side of dictation as TL. It’s a big issue.
I’m glad it resonated, Amrut.
That's very interesting Akash! Kudos on the book as well, and thanks for the mention!
Glad you liked it, Nicola.
Kudos for the hook launch!! How the hell did you manage to do it in parallel to everything else 😅
The next one is to be on security of AI! Looking forward to getting started on that project!
Thanks, Anton. It took a really long time, but I’m glad it came at the perfect moment. My ten years in security!
Managing time with addition to everything was challenging but doing research and the whole writing part in the long form taught me a ton!
How did you go about it? I would love to hear the long version about that book’s story :)
It took me a long time, but it can be a good topic for a future post 😃
Very informative and explained in a simple way
Thanks, glad you liked it.
Loved the Article! Thanks for sharing.
Glad you liked it!
Great article, Akash. Loved your "bad" and "good" example quotes to highlight how to use the advice in practice.
I’m glad you liked it Jordan. Exemplifying like that is something I picked up from working with you, so thank you for that 🙌
+1 to this. As an IC myself and a mentor to 2 interns, this article gives some good ideas on helping those who seek help from you grow. I think one more thing that I found useful is also highlighting ways your reports can make their insights/learnings/ideas more visible (eg: in the example with OOM error, I think a phrasing after the investigation/thread like "thanks for investigating. Let's share this in retro/team meeting and brainstorm as a team next steps" or "lets write a brief investigation doc about this and share with the team for their comments" would be a way to take one step further)
Thanks, Karthik. Glad you liked it.
And yes, framings on follow up like those can be a great way to share them wider. Thanks for sharing.
Glad you liked my followup comment. Im planning on writing up an article in my newsletter regarding the importance on investigation docs
Awesome, I'm a big fan of postmortem/root cause analysis. Be sure to share the link when it's live :)
For sure!
Leadership is difficult, and few of us have natural traits of the kind. Leadership is what we must learn. Thank you for sharing!
You’re 100% right. Investment must be made to help engineers transition from IC to lead. Way too many TLs (including me) shows this characteristic.
What do you think about that?