| The distinction here is between Politician and Technician. At the DevLead level one is a technician - diving into the complexities and trade offs and making a decision that will meet constraints that are the end point of a political process the devlead probably was not a part of The politician you seem to be thinking of is someone (possibly the same someone) who is active in the political process that ends up deciding the constraints the technician works under - internal and external to the organisation So this will be some of email threads or chats amoung some or all other devleads, it will be "being helpful" answering requests, assigning resources or time to help other politicians, or worse architecture diagrams, or it will be speaking at conferences etc etc etc. In the lingo it's becoming an "Authority". But one is only an "Authority" by being accepted by a "constituency" - maybe "all the devs in the company who think we ought to start using git" is your leadership position (ok maybe that's a decade old now but it's an easy example). Betray the constituency and lose the leadership position. Neither are better than the other. Some political processes are better than others (in a democracy we perhaps appreciate this). Open decision making is likely to lead to long term better decisions - even if it is messy. Linus Torvalds is an obvious leader example - using one political process (this is what I think - essentially using email as Thomas Paine used pamphlets) But yeah - "managing" 5 people is reasonable - by the time you hit 12 it's a full time job listening to the moaning and they stop being a devlead. Only some can be a politican and a manager at same time. |