Tech Lead Anti-patterns

Sometime ago I watched a talk on People First Engineering Management @ Monzo. It’s full of really interesting and insightful content but my biggest takeaway was the following the tech lead anti-patterns.

Let’s use Monzo’s definition of a Tech lead first:

• A fairly experienced engineer
• Who is still working as an individual contributor and writing code.
• And wears a hat 👒 (this is not a role or a progression level)

They are expected to:

• Pair with the product manager on the squad’s success
• Provide technical context and direction
• Enable and empower other engineers
• Foster effective collaboration
• Won’t necessarily be a tech lead forever

Now that we have this in mind here are the anti-patterns:

• The Faux PM 👩🏻‍🏫
  • Tries to get involved by prioritising the backlog
  • Doing their own research
  • Writing their own tickets (team’s tickets)
  • Finding features on their own
• The Dictator 👮🏻‍♂️
  • This is where they define the scope of the project and hand it off to somebody else
  • Over specifying and not doing any implementation themselves
  • Only ever doing the most interesting work
• The Martyr 🧝🏻‍♀️
  • Tries to do everything, all the small and boring tasks
  • Working late, trying to save the day, so no one else has to
  • Not knowing when to delegate
• The Over-Empathiser 👩🏽‍⚕️
  • Not giving constructive feedback
  • Not holding people to account
  • Fixing other people’s code themselves