
The Effective Tech Lead Is a 100x Engineer - kevinSuttle
https://hackernoon.com/the-effective-tech-lead-is-a-100x-engineer-fe49c0372a63
======
tboyd47
> The Tech Lead is a “hybrid” role with one foot in management and the other
> in engineering

I may have a limited experience but I've never seen an effective Tech Lead who
was a hybrid like this and I have serious doubts it's even possible. The
amount of time these tech leads spend coding necessarily expands and consumes
the time they have available for management. The type of "management" they do
then becomes more defensive/territorial than directing/guiding. In the end
they end up more of a dev with super powers who has a veto over every other
developer's technical decisions, but is still primarily concerned with
completing their own contributions rather than the project and team health as
a whole. In the best case, they do split work, delegate, mentor, and lead
meetings, but always end up doing the business critical or challenging pieces
themselves (because why would I take the time to explain this when I could
just do it...), and in the worst case, they don't delegate at all and actually
communicate even less than they did as an individual contributor.

~~~
jdmichal
> The amount of time these tech leads spend coding necessarily expands and
> consumes the time they have available for management.

I call this being a "dev++", and I think it's an unhealthy mindset for
leadership. Moving into leadership means advancing beyond the tasks you used
to do. This is true _everywhere_ , and lack of promoting yourself beyond those
tasks _will_ drag you down. This goes all the way up to c-suite level, where
people fail due to focusing too much on their old group and job, and neglect
all the new groups they inherited in the promotion.

I've been an individual tech lead for a few years now, and am about to take on
a team while still maintaining the technical leadership role. I'm basically
going to be a blended technical lead, project manager, and people manager. The
only way I could do this was to stop coding myself. If I'm coding, it's to
investigate an issue that has stumped others, or do a proof-of-concept for a
particular technology or pattern.

Otherwise, my time is entirely devoted to helping individual developers
increase their understanding of our stack or engineering in general. Or, on
the other side, sitting with business and understanding requirements so that I
can determine how engineering will approach the problem. I then delegate that
vision to the engineers to implement, with code review closing the loop.

~~~
tboyd47
Thank you, this is exactly what I'm getting at.

I have been a non-coding tech lead before, and I do not understand how a
person can both code and manage others without working overtime. Coding
requires hours of uninterrupted focus time every day. Management requires
making yourself available to help people. You cannot be both available and not
available.

~~~
heurist
It's taken me a while to get to this point, but I enjoy the challenge of
managing both sides of the house. I've learned that if I participate in a non-
tech meeting, there is a high probability that I will be useless at coding the
rest of the day. For that reason, I arranged my schedule to have almost all
meetings on Mondays and Tuesdays. I've also learned that coffee helps me
express my vision more effectively but can ruin my concentration, so I use it
for "people" days. Also, little technical interruptions don't bother me so
much as interruptions that get me thinking about a new course of action. When
I'm not certain about the course of action I go into processing mode until I
figure it out, which keeps me from making any coding progress. Recognizing
those interruptions and logging them outside of my brain for later processing
has helped a lot. I'm sure I have a few other little tricks too... Routine is
really key for me.

My team is small and nearly everyone works well independent of my management.
I expect that my coding time will diminish as the team grows larger.

------
bargl
This was a fantastic read that isn't done any service by the CRAPPY title of
the article. I can say that they aren't trying to get 10x the work on 1x the
budget, but how to effectively manage a team so that your employees feel
motivated to work hard for you when they are at work, but aren't stressed by
external factors.

The basic premise is how do you as a manager give your team 10x time to
actually work, focus on work, and enjoy life.

Please don't be deterred by the terrible title. Or even not so fantastic
intro.

~~~
leonardsouza
Hey @bargl-

I'm the author of that article and I couldn't agree with your summary more.

"The basic premise is how do you as a manager give your team 10x time to
actually work, focus on work, and enjoy life."

Thanks for sharing that!

(Also, apologies for the click-baity, terrible title, lol. I tried to make
light of it in the article.)

~~~
bargl
I loved the article. I fell into a project management / tech lead role and
while I love it I have failed at a LOT of things while working through it. I
didn't have a mentor to what an effective Tech Lead which I feel like this
article serves as. IMO the intro to the article makes up for the title and the
content of it is amazing.

For example, I've pushed back on management about deadlines because developers
hate them and it causes stress / stagnation. BUT the business needs them and I
love how you talk to that in a way that I can effectively manage both up and
down. Thank you very much for this. If I'd read it 4 months earlier I'd have
missed some major (self inflicted) pain points.

------
pro_zac
I've found the key to being an effective tech lead is to look at the team as
an extension of yourself. As a senior engineer there is only so much you can
do. Given the right team, you can do much more. This requires you do the
planning and specifications, and occasionally pick off the difficult task.
However, you must balance your engineering time against the productivity of
the team.

My number one goal as a lead is always for my team to come in and work without
interruption. Everything they need to complete a task should be in the task
management software. This is what I want as a dev, and so is what I aim to
provide for my devs. This doesn't mean writing all the specs myself. Give the
devs enough info to write their own tasks and review them before they start.
This is manageable up to about 6 people. If you have a bigger team, then you
need sub-leads to spread the load.

~~~
Tomminn
Or, to be glib, you now program programmers, and so code in the highest level
programming language of all.

------
mykull
I really don't think coining the term 10x did anything to help developers or
the state of development, and likewise here.

~~~
alex-
I also agree that it is not a helpful term.

I like to think we are all 10x developers. The question of a 1x developer
should be how to grow their productivity (assuming they are motivated to do
so). Less productive developers should not feel like they have one tenth of
the natural talent someone else has. Instead they should look at how they can
improve their work flow/knowledge and companies should try and maximise the
output of their employees.

Yes some people will always be better/more productive than others, but most
people are differentiated by completely controllable factors.

~~~
commandlinefan
> I like to think we are all 10x developers

Well, that's why the author had to call tech leads "100x developers". x
inflation has led us to this situation where 10x is now a baseline minimum.
Anything under 100x is just mediocre.

------
mav3r1ck
Having been on a project with a 100x tech lead who rarely wrote code (but
every time it was amazing) due to their leadership position, followed (and
preceded now that I think about it) by a project where the tech lead was a 10x
engineer who wrote tons of solid, bug-free code ,but was not really a great
tech lead, this is 100% true. The difference between the projects were night
and day.

The defining feature of the 100x tech lead for me was their ability to do code
reviews-- with a tilt of the head, they would point out something that no one
else thought of and helped make the code better. I really wish I had the
ability to review code that way that 100xer did.

~~~
maxxxxx
Yeah. Reading code is definitely an underrated skill. I always think that
Linus Torvals' secret is his ability to read code quickly and comprehend it on
a deep level.

I am pretty good at reviewing single blocks of code but if you dump a complex
system on me I struggle to comprehend it in depth within reasonable time.

------
yc-kraln
You know what happens at 100x? You burn out 100x faster. But you aren't paid
100x more.

~~~
bargl
From the article.

> How can I avoid burning my team out?

If a team can't meet a deadline, it's a management problem, and not the team's
problem. This means that, somewhere along the way, the project didn't go as
planned and a course wasn't corrected. So, Rule Number 1 to avoid burnout is
"Manage the project and expectations well" (See: Help! We are behind
schedule!).

Rule number 2: Never ask more of your team than you would ask of yourself (and
you mustn't ask yourself to work nights and weekends). Other organizations
might ask their teams to pull longer hours when the going gets rough. This is
a laser-focused bullet train to attrition and long-term inefficiencies.
Webflow cares deeply about its team, not only professionally, but personally,
so we must do our best to manage our time well.

------
dfsegoat
"Force multiplier" \-- love that you borrowed this term from military
doctrine, because that is exactly what a good tech lead is IMO. Per the Wiki
definition [0]:

"Force multiplication or a force multiplier refers to a factor or a
combination of factors that dramatically increases (hence "multiplies") the
effectiveness of an item or group, giving a given number of troops (or other
personnel) or weapons (or other hardware) the ability to accomplish greater
things than without it."

[0] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_multiplication](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_multiplication)

~~~
lfowles
Interesting, I didn't realize the term was so strongly associated with
military doctrine. Just assumed it was a glorified way of referring to simple
machines such as levers.

------
aylmao
I know it's hyperbole and I'm being nit-picky but come on, 100x?

10x already sounds a bit like exaggeration, but implying there's an engineer
out there who can do the same amount of work in 3-4 days as a normal engineer
in a year is too much lol.

~~~
trendia
I can think of an example, though even this is somewhat of astretch:

Suppose person A takes 40 hours to write C code to manipulate a large data
set.

Person B puts the data in a database and is able to write commands, which only
take 10 minutes, to achieve roughly the same thing.

~~~
aylmao
Oh, I can see this, ok. I've spent an hour or so googling and debugging
something before asking someone who knows the answer and does it in like 30
seconds hahah.

Person A should've considered alternatives and asked around before spending a
week on that manipulation lol.

------
acconrad
I really don't understand what the difference is between tech lead and
engineering manager after reading this article. I did exactly these things and
also people management as an EM but I spent 75% coding/code review and 25% in
meetings/one-on-ones. 30% seems awfully low for a tech lead; is this just like
a new term that's been recently birthed in job descriptions? It seems like
it's for companies that are too small to have principal software
engineers/architects and also too small to have a management track, but they
have EMs at Webflow so I'm really curious what the author does in his day-to-
day.

------
imh
1) Can mods change the title to something not-clickbait, maybe even related to
the content of the article? The author acknowledges it's trash and does it
anyways, but we don't have to. Perhaps "The Webflow Tech Lead Guide"

2) Does anyone know of any data to support the 10x/100x idea? I hear it thrown
around so much, but it's always struck me as an echo chamber kind of self
affirmation to support questionable hiring practices and cop-outs.

------
dpweb
Stress is more a function of the culture of the company you are working for
and can be influenced by your manager and direct coworkers but not by much.
Culture is like the weather and is created by the very top level executives.

As far as the legend of the 10x or 100x developer, technically it does exist
in the sense that the smart lead will not even entertain time wasting efforts,
so to calculate the value of that you could say is infinite x.

I’m skeptical however that you can transfer your extraordinary abilities to
your team members. The most brilliant productive people I cant imagine they
can truly transfer that to others. Their ability comes off more like a God
given gift, so to speak. Surely they add value individually and add value to
each team member by their guidance and mentorship.

The 10x concept though somewhat confuses the truly important question, both to
the technical programmer employee and their capitalist business bosses. How
much value is really being added and at what cost.

------
argimenes
Why not a 1,000,000,000x engineer? There, I win.

------
juandazapata
Click bait. Even the author recognizes it in the very first paragraph.

------
morley
I'm a little surprised that in the article, the tech lead is in charge of
breaking up a task into parts. That seems like something a capable SEII should
be able to handle, and it only improves them to be able to develop that skill.
(Though maybe that means I was a lot less effective as a tech lead than I
thought.)

~~~
tzhenghao
I don't think you're wrong here. Relatively experienced SWEs should be able to
do this by themselves. Tech leads should be delegating some of this
responsibility to the individual contributors and only offering minor pushback
to keep general clean architecture and higher level tech infrastructure goals
in check.

------
bm1362
I've been a tech lead in the past and am currently a tech lead for a 1-man
project. I agree with the sentiments here: if you're contributing a
significant amount of code then you're probably failing the rest of the team
in some way.

It's hard to be on top of everyone else's work, the architecture, the weekly
planning and the external team syncs while also trying to write features.

Being alone, I'm basically taking shortcuts to get results until I have more
bandwidth or get a team member to help shore things up. The goals and
deadlines were set way above my head so unfortunately outcomes are prioritized
as it stands.

------
bluesnowmonkey
How am I supposed to write a spec so detailed that Junior engineers can build
it? To be a tech lead you have to do waterfall development?

------
Madmallard
I think with these multipliers itd be better just understanding the IQs of the
people involved. Two of the most influential Tech Leads of our time had ~160
IQs by estimates: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

------
ianstallings
Good content in your guide to your new tech leads, laying out expectations
right up front and giving them guidance. Most companies don't have anything
like that, in my experience.

------
megamindbrian2
The only "work that matters" is growing food and service people. The rest of
this up and coming technology bubble is hubris.

~~~
joejerryronnie
Yes, but we also need soldiers to keep other soldiers from taking the food.
And stone keeps and villages with market places to trade food for goods. And
better farming techniques to increase our food production. Also, some more
advanced machines to allow better food processing and some textiles. We
probably need something a little more efficient than water or steam power. And
logistics! Definitely need a way to get people and goods from one place to
another. At some point, we'll need to organize all this activity better and
start to specialize. Maybe there's a better way to track all this stuff than
manual ledgers. Wait, we can leverage electricity and simple lever machines
(up/down or 0/1 if you will) for tracking this stuff. Perhaps if we connected
all these machines together into some kind of a network . . .

~~~
megamindbrian2
If every neighborhood had a lot designed to produce food for every person +1
we wouldn't need so much logistics and lever machines.

------
afinlayson
Yes, but the wrong one can be 100x the failure. This goes for all leadership
positions.

------
badloginagain
Only comments here discussing the shittiness of '100x' engineer, despite the
first paragraph of the article specifically stating that a good Lead is a
force multiplier of a team.

Read the article.

~~~
braythwayt

      > There are two kinds of blog post titles
      >
      > Those that everybody complains about, and those that
      > nobody has read, because they attracted no attention.
    

Massive oversimplification, but still... In a world where clicks are driven by
upvotes and retweets and shares and so forth... Gaining early attention is
vital.

