[bguthrie]

I'd like to differ slightly: the job of a good tech lead is to be an effective first among equals.

If you're working on a talented team, there should be no presupposition that the tech lead is necessarily the best developer on it. But you should be good enough to break ties and set direction. I've worked on a lot of teams with talented developers who aren't especially interested in leadership, or former leads who've decided they want to go back and hack some more. You cannot, and should not, boss these people around. But you can block management up, and unblock team down, by keeping management out of everyone's hair, and keep the developers from tearing each other apart over complicated technical questions or obscure business ones.

If you're working on a team that embraces pairing, that can ease a lot of the pressure on the lead to do reviews as long as the pairs are well-chosen. Trust but verify.

[arethuza]

My own take on it is different again - as far as I see it the job of technical lead on a project is take ensure that the right technical decisions get made and to ultimately take responsibility for those decisions. Yes, I could directly override people and tell them to do things - but if I ever did that then IMHO I would have failed.

A lot of my job is asking questions, making suggestions and proving (when necessary) that something can actually be done. [I love it when someone utters a phrase starting "There is no way to...."]