How to be the Boss Your Team Deserves: Stop Coding

I'll preface this by saying that different companies have different management/team structures and expectations. So this draws from my own experience, and is likely a bit different than the OP's situation.

In my particular case, I'm a team lead, but not a manager. My manager is also the direct manager of everyone on my team. He's the "people" manager, and spends no time coding. He's expected to be technical, but not actually build things.

I would be very sad if I didn't get to write (production) code. It's just one of the things I want to do. But I also want to play a role in deciding what we build, as well as tackling architecture and design problems, which I can't do particularly effectively (if at all) as a non-lead.

Having said that, I likely do code more than I should. I could be spending more time doing code reviews and helping the people on my team be more successful at what they're doing. I've been thinking about all this for a while, but I haven't really done much about it. Reading this article has given me a bit of a kick to revisit all this.

The two tasks aren't mutually exclusive. If you can only do one, then that's fine, there isn't anything wrong with that. But leadership has nothing to do with a title, so if you weren't leading before you took a leadership role, then of course you're going to struggle.

This has been one of the hardest moves to make. I love how you captured how difficult and scary it can be to make a move like this.

Great article.

Summary: If you're leading a development team, stop coding and focus on being a great boss!

> and over the next 4 years I would _loose_ the “Junior” prefix