| 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. |