[jcadam]

Most companies (and/or government agencies) in the real world aren't willing to pay for top-quality developers. Hopefully you can get lucky and end up with one strong software engineer on a team otherwise filled with marginally competent code monkeys. In those cases you absolutely want to place the top developer in charge (until he/she gets recruited away, that is), though if you have a strong dues-paying culture it may be difficult to replace an entrenched, useless senior engineer with someone better.

[ep103]

This is the only thing I was thinking this entire article.

I'm a dev lead. If I had an entire team of my great engineers, my job would be easy. I'd simply delegate my duties to everyone else, and we'd all be nearly equal.

The reality is I have 2 junior people who need to be guidanced through everything. I have one moderately experienced guy who just wants to be left alone to solve bugs on his own, in quiet isolation. I have one moderately experienced guy, who's ambitious, but used to cut corners when he thought no one was paying attention. And I have one senior dev who is a great coder, and can take 1 or 2 juniors under his wing, but hates code architecture with a passion and just wants to make small ui features on the main website.

Who, exactly, then can I delegate everything to? Removing a tech lead would be disastrous.

I'm jealous of people who work in a shop where the teams are so well constructed, that they think you can get rid of the tech lead role.

I'm also willing to bet that those people either have amazing tech leads, and don't realize it, or have amazing managers one level higher, and simply haven't climbed high enough up the managerial ladder to see how lucky or how much work goes into that.

[JamesBarney]

I'd like to hear more about the senior dev who hates code architecture. Do you have any examples? I still go back and forth on on the value of code architecture, and I think some examples might be enlightening.

[ep103]

Not a formal or philosophical thing, he's just used to feature development, and/or working on somewhat isolated things. Building out code on a project wide level, so it can have features built into it, is just a level larger than what he used to be comfortable with, I think. And also, framework building doesn't have ui design component, which is something he enjoys.

[mnsc]

Hey, quit!

[ep103]

Nah, I like these people, and helping them grow.

[pc86]

More than technical expertise this is what will make you a good lead.

You can learn the tech side. You can't learn to like your team, be a good person, or enjoy helping people.

[mnsc]

Hey, awesome attitude!

[mattsmith321]

I'm in a similar situation as ep103 and it isn't always that easy to just quit. Lots of things keep a person where they are that are unique to their own world. Plus, at this point in my career, I'm getting to the point where I am that slightly out of touch dev manager who has to catch himself from saying things like "Back in my day..." Plus, where would I go? Certainly not to a great place like the author's location where everything is so good that they don't need tech leads like myself.