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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

All true, but you did plenty. You got things out of their way. You made the call on trimming requirements when that normally would have resulted in scheduling a meeting to get approval.

Bravo for that. Getting decisions made is one of the biggest hindrances to moving forward.

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OK sure - I didn't do nothing. But let's be honest - what I did was nowhere near as difficult as actually developing software.

That depends on the political environment, you still had to get the CIO to accept being booted out of the stand-up, the stakeholders to accept you deciding on the requirements and so on. Sometimes it's relatively easy, sometimes it's impossible.

Yep, he had the balls to stand up for the team, and to get away with that the organisation has to be very pragmatic and reasonable, which is not always the case..

We love to say this, and it makes the techie inside feel good, but then why are there so many good devs and so few great leads?

Hmm. Maybe I'm just a mediocre maintenance dev but a decent tech lead. I went back to being a dev afterwards, and I was shocked by how much harder I found it.

I'll say one mistake is to have a tech lead that spends most of their time coding. I don't know how you can do everything else effectively if the company still relies on you to deliver code.

I'm facing this right now, but I enjoy coding so much more. It's a hard choice, but I'm leaning towards going back to coding full time. Worse career choice, but better for my sanity, I think.

A possible explanation is that leading a team effectively isn't necessarily more difficult, but rather that it might be less pleasant and/or less financially advantageous than being either an individual contributor or an ineffective team leader.

On the contrary. Dealing with bullshitters is much more difficult than writing code.

In my experience, it's way harder to find good managers than it is finding good developers. Maybe I've just seen a bunch of talented devs and outright terrible managers, but that's my data point.

Dunno, I think I’d rather have one of you than one extra good dev.

The org also needs to be set up to do this though. I’d love to boot some people out of our meetings and prevent them from waffling on.

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