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Comment by calchris42 | Hacker News Reader

The article pretty much ignores factors external to the development team. In my experience at a larger company, a key role of tech lead is as a central communication point for other teams / disciplines / projects. It becomes infeasible for every person working on a product to have to know exactly who to talk to for every question. Instead with leads, if I have a sw question, an electrical question, a service question, I know who to go to. This doesn't mean the lead has to know everything themselves. Can always refer me to the expert. But ideally the lead is also someone with above average communication skills.

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>It becomes infeasible for every person working on a product to have to know exactly who to talk to for every question.

It is, however, perfectly feasible to ask such questions on a team chatroom. "Who knows about [x]?" is usually enough to get the right person to talk to and it means the lead doesn't keep getting interrupted.

A team chatroom... what a nice idea. This was a larger, more enterprise company. Enough said?

But seriously, I think the answer depends heavily on company and team size. The role I mention is a lot less critical for smaller teams or when there are minimal different stakeholders involved.

>A team chatroom... what a nice idea. This was a larger, more enterprise company. Enough said?

Are you literally saying that larger companies need managers for their dev teams because they're too enterprise to use slack?

FWIW I've used both in larger companies and smaller companies.

>But seriously, I think the answer depends heavily on company and team size.

I don't think it does. Slack chatrooms and email lists scale.

As a counterpoint to that maybe everyone on the team should know who the expert is in any particular area and EVERY member of the team should have adequate communication skills

This is wishful thinking at best, companies require practical thinking because reality is corporate suicide. Not everyone will have great communication skills - and as a team increases in size, this becomes increasingly difficult.

This isn't wishful thinking, I work with a 100% remote dev team and communication skills is one of the top things we screen for when interviewing. I assume other remote teams also value that skill.

Communication skills are certainly important. I believe we both agree communication both at an organizational level, as well at a personal level is important.

My point is that as an organization scales, you will have many teams, and teams of teams even. The wishful thinking is that you can disband this entire structure because 'we hire good communicators'.

I don't know what part of the industry you work in, but the idea that we would hire someone incapable of communication at the level of "you should ask Dave of Simon about that feature" seems nuts to me.

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