
Tips for Tech Leads - brlewis
http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/04/tips-for-tech-leads.html
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yanilkr
The best way to be a team lead is not to be one. Companies impose a title
"team lead" when its not necessary at all. If you are skillful, helpful and
bring good energy to the team, other people will respect you, trust you and
learn from you and thats what a team lead should be.

An imposed Lead is someone who is a point of beaurocracy, someone who can
selectively hide/filter information to have a better control, a step in the
approval process and many other unwanted things.

"I am Team Lead, I will schedule 1:1 and frequently schedule lunch ...."
sounds like trying too hard. It is sure good to have team lunches, having 1:1
with everyone in team etc, but for some other reasons

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watmough
If you have people working off-site, make damn sure they have a separate dev
box, set up their way, locked up in a server room, preferably with a way to
reset it when needed.

Laptops do not cut it for development for big corporate C++/C# batch type
apps.

I managed to snaffle a decent desktop box and sweet-talk IT into burying it in
a corner of the server room. And yes, good devs are 'special'!

It was worth a lot to me to have a fast dev machine on the other end of a VPN,
the crucial thing being that numskulls and nincompoops couldn't reassign it so
some bozo could check his email and surf facebook on it.

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stuff4ben
I'm glad this article was written. I've found out some of these things the
hard way as an introverted geek. Due to my personality and general disdain of
meetings, I will probably never go down the management path, so becoming a
tech lead is one of the viable options I've taken at a couple places. Let me
say that going out to lunch (and beer Fridays if your company allows that)
with your team is one of the best things you can do. It helps the team to jell
and fosters open communication which is essential IMO.

~~~
watmough
As a former tech lead, if you are really mentoring and helping people, bet on
allocating 20% of your time per person. Of course this leaves you with a LOT
less time to do your own job, but with luck, your team's goal should be to do
a better job than you yourself could have done.

Which was always my target. The team did it, and did it better than I could
have expected.

This 20% ties in great with many modest management types who are out of their
comfort zone above about 3 people. There a quote somewhere in Programmers at
Work that the best team is one that will still fit in a VW Bug.

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mbrubeck
_Peopleware_ is out of print? That's a real shame. I wish as many managers had
read _Peopleware_ as have read _The Mythical Man Month_. If your local library
has a copy, check it out.

Here are some small excerpts:

[http://www.mattblodgett.com/2008/06/select-quotes-from-
peopl...](http://www.mattblodgett.com/2008/06/select-quotes-from-peopleware-
part-2.html)

<http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/001248.php>

~~~
pchristensen
Available direct from publisher: <http://www.dorsethouse.com/books/pw.html>

~~~
piaw
Ah cool. Thanks!

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robosox
Great article, and as indicated in his blog's comments, very similar to Rands
in Repose (<http://www.randsinrepose.com>) whose writings in this space are
similar.

I can't stress enough how useful 1:1s are for my own team (I believe Google
follows the Andy Grove model mentioned in "High Output Management", another
great book). It's easy for engineers to under-communicate those somewhat-
important-but-not-really issues with their tech lead / manager, and getting it
out on the table during 1:1s is crucial to keeping said issues from getting
out of hand.

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apphacker
> "And no, I don't consider upgrades every 18 months a waste of money if your
> business depends on the productivity of engineers, but many companies do. I
> just don't understand it."

I'm currently using an almost 4 year old Macbook Pro for work. One the one
hand I seem to be able to do my job 99% of the time just fine, but it can be
slow. On the other hand it is an almost 4 year old computer. I haven't
complained about it because it's a Macbook Pro and just about everyone else
has Dells with Windows XP and I don't think I'd get another Macbook Pro.

~~~
jimbokun
My bosses just significantly upgraded our hardware, mainly because they
couldn't afford raises at that time. We knew that's why they were doing it,
but it was still nice to get new machines with big monitors.

That's what I think the article is getting at. Hardware is a cheap way to make
your employees a little bit happier, and the employees at least know that
you're trying.

~~~
mbarr
That's not the point he is trying to make. Computers are the tools of your
job. Not providing the best tools is a false economy because the cost is
easily offset by the increased productivity of the programmer.

