Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by thoughtspile 849 days ago
Well, it's well known that to become a team lead you must eat the previous team lead)

To be fair, some managers over-optimize to protect against people undermining them, not sharing knowledge and responsibility and even actively removing top performers with leadership ambitions

2 comments

Not necessarily! You can just hang in tight and let someone else eat the team lead. In my experience it is often product people wishing to cosplay as tech lead (and they will promptly proceed trying do the same to you), or a middle manager/CTO (ditto).
Something I’ve noticed in the company I work for is that team leads which still write code is that they will take for themselves the high visibility projects.
I even think this is sometimes in good faith, as in "this is some serious shot, better handle it myself to avoid failure".

My favorite pattern is what I call "code sheriff" lead, who does all code reviews himself to prevent bad code from reaching trunk. Then proceed to complain how you can't go on a vacation because all processes stop.

Or worse, only do shiny and "fun" things that customers don't care about while ignoring all sorts of practical bugs/issues.