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by throwaw12 99 days ago
as a team lead, if you are not aware of what's happening in the team, what kind of team lead is this?

on the other hand, you may have been an engineering manager, who is responsible for the team, but a lot of times they do not participate in on-call rotations (only as last escalation)

2 comments

> what kind of team lead is this?

One that trusts the team?

Knowing what's happening in the team and personally reviewing parts of the code for best practices are very different things. Are the other team members happy? Does development seem to go smoothly, quickly and without constantly breaking? Does the team struggle to upgrade or refactor things? At some level you have to start trusting that the people working know what they're doing, and help guide from a higher level so they understand how to make the right tradeoffs for the business.

As a team lead, I know the architecture, the functional and non functional requirements, I know the website is suppose to do $x but I definitely didn’t guide how since I haven’t done web development in a quarter century, I know the best practices for architecture and data engineering (to a point).

That doesn’t mean I did a code review for all of the developers. I will ask them how they solved for a problem that I know can be tricky or did they take into account for something.