Having a tech lead role is a sign your management is broken. Change my mind.

@advicepig See I keep seeing this but then it comes with no actual promotion, because ... the management is kinda screwed up.

@aredridel Oh, that's bad. This typically comes as a promotion and comes with money in the orgs I've seen it in. Without that, it's gaslighting.

@advicepig Yeah. At this point I fully expect that role to be called 'staff engineer’ (... or senior engineer)

@aredridel In higher ed, we have a lot of small six or eight person teams here and there, and it's hard to manage that in the university bureaucracy.

@advicepig This seems so wild to me because that's like a very normal size of group within administration. Though I guess those tend to be pretty flat. Then again, on a team of 6 to 8 ... it can probably be pretty flat. One manager. Maybe ideally two. Of course, you probably can't get two, so you call one ... oho, tech lead. I stand by my assertion here :P

@aredridel Oh, I mean the entire IT org is 6-8

@advicepig ohhhh. Also doesn’t seem like it needs a tech lead role.

@aredridel We briefly had tech leads for about a year (I was one of them!), which I don’t think was particularly successful, but have gone back to a more traditional engineering manager structure (of which I am very glad to not be one). Still not sure what I think of the whole thing, but mostly I know I don’t particularly like combining team lead + HR management into the same role. It can be done well (and I’m very glad my current manager is sensible about the technical leadership side), but I’ve seen it fail way more than I’ve seen it work.

@alpha @aredridel +1 to this. as a managee, manager, and often tech lead, I've always liked being able to have a clear responsibility - to project delivery (and people on the team), and to HR but not project. but it's often been challenging. I've never experienced a good hierarchical management where manager is on the team and responsible for success of that team, though believe it could be done.

@endocrimes is tech lead a path to that? Or a distraction?

@aredridel @advicepig maybe "lead" is easier to understand as prestigeous than e.g. "staff" (at least as a non-native speaker it has no meaning for me aside of "working for"). I also noticed a lot of "manager" roles that did not manage anyone, so I guess thats also to signal prestige of the role…

@simulo @advicepig that’s the thing. It so often seems hollow and unfocused. “Lead” as a promotion without power and not quite a title. Just an additional role.