[britch]

On my team at least there's a grey area between managers responsibilities and Tech lead responsibilities.

Managers are ultimately responsible for getting tasks that stretch employees abilities, but also in my experience don't have hands on the code. They're usually dealing with politics around team priorities, goals, keeping people motivated, etc.

Managers rely on tech leads to identify work that needs to get done and would be a good fit for the newbie. Tech leads also have to teach newbies best practices, offer advice on designs, etc.

Managers are often technical (e.g. used to be programming daily), but are not actively writing code anymore.

I feel this is a bad situation for tech leads since they have to sort of manage, and do design work, and write code. Kind of a thankless job

[scotty79]

In my last corporate job we didn't have a manager. Tech lead was filling that role.