Promoted to Tech Lead, but I feel it's not for me, too early?

Posted by Big-Discussion9699@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 30 comments

Hi all, I've been coding for 8 years. Joined a medium company(+400 employees and around 50 devs in different areas) 3 years ago.

I've started as Senior and promoted to Tech Lead 2 months ago and I feel I regret it.

For more context, I've been an IC all time. I love to code, help my team to improve(code reviews, pair programming, debugging). I've been a top performer in all my previous jobs and also on this one. Always picking up the most complex tickets and leading the architecture of how we will build a specific big feature/rewrite, enhance DX, add tests, involved with other teams to give input about architecture or a specific problem we need to fix, you know...lot of cool stuff that makes me happy.

Now, my boss (Principal Engineer) promoted me to Teach Lead of 6 team members 2 months ago and told me I will be 20% helping in management/meetings/admin stuff but also involved in architecture decisions and coding.

The reality is a bit different.

Now, my calendar looks like a PM's one. Around 8/10 hours a week booked in advance to get involved in new projects, new features, discussions with other teams. Few hours helping my team to unblock them(debugging, architecture decisions), also doing lot of code reviews.

I do the maths, and I would have 4hrs a week or even less to "actually" code. I don't get assigned any more tickets, I've asked for tickets to my boss more than 8 times in the last 2 months to my boss and told him "I have capacity, let me help with the most complex tickets you have", and he said "You're doing it great, your performance is not driven by the amount of tickets anymore, you're helping lot of devs right now"

I don't know. I feel I'm not helping or doing anything meaningful anymore. Is this normal? Maybe I was born to be a Senior my whole life?

I miss writing code and I can't do it on my free time for family stuff. So the only time to be "happy coding" is at work time and now I don't have that anymore.

Don't get me wrong, I like to be involved in technical decisions, doing code reviews, helping with the trickiest bugs, or fixing prod being on call at 2am(once in a while of course), but I feel I don't have that capacity anymore.

What should I do?

Move on to another company?

Suck it up?

Learn how to be a Teach Lead and forget about "completing tickets and go home"?

I don't know, I feel I'm going nowhere. Please any advice is welcome.

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davy_jones_locket@reddit

Learn how to be a tech lead. The next promotion is either staff (or principal if you don't have staff) if you want to be more IC, or engineering manager if you want more management. The alternative is terminal senior.

The stakeholder interactions will be invaluable to your career regardless of whether you go principal/staff track or management track.

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Gunny2862@reddit

Was going to just say the usual, "lots of devs don't like being promoted" but this is a better take.

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1000Ditto@reddit

Methinks that op's idea of devlead is more technical, whereas technical leadership is more about clarifying, scoping, and being more of a team multiplier than a singular IC (not sure if op is considered an IC still?) . Most devs do end as a terminal senior, and I have seen several do teamlead <-> staff

https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes/ may help bridge the gap between the expectation from principal and techlead on career goals/focuses

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davy_jones_locket@reddit

Lol I included both of Will Larson's books on my list

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Big-Discussion9699@reddit (OP)

Do you have any resources, books, anything that could help me with this? I feel have little/no guidance at all and I really want to be a good teach lead, even if my next role is a senior forever

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davy_jones_locket@reddit

Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond Management Track (Will Larson)

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management (Will Lawson)

Develop Your Leadership Powers (Dietmar Sternad)

Unmanaged (Jack Skeels)

Multipliers (Liz Wiseman)

Impact Players (Liz Wiseman)

The Coaching Habit (Michael Bungay Stanier)

Stewardship (Peter Block)

The Empowered Manager (Peter Block)

Flawless Consulting (Peter Block)

Of these books, I'd prioritize Liz Wiseman and Peter Block first. Most relevant to learning skills like empowering your team, working with stakeholders ("clients"), developing a mental model of stewardship vs ownership (to get over that change from being the person that delivers and owns the big hard tickets to supporting the next person who does that).

The others are general leadership skills that you're gonna need to develop. Unmanaged and The Coaching Habit are great for relationship building in your team as a lead.

The Will Larson books are good dives into each path afterward, but good intros to the kind of skills needed for both so you can figure out what aligns closer to your needs.

shlock2000@reddit

You might want to shift your mindset to being a force multiplier instead of being an IC. It's a mindset shift but it's fulfilling to mentor people and build an efficient team. Your company is basically saying they trust your technical capabilities and they need more people like you so you're going to have to train them. You're going to have to solve process problems in addition to technical problems to set your team up for success.

Some review process causing friction? figure out how to fix it.

Some process to complex or time consuming? automate it.

Devs spending too much time in meetings? figure out how to reduce them.

These are all problems that actually affect productivity and they're fun to solve. You'll get to code occasionally when there comes a problem that is taking too long to figure out or deadlines are tight and they need someone to reign it in.

The hard problems that you used to solve, you need to teach your team how to solve them instead of solving it for them. Takes a while to get used to it but once it clicks, it's great.

All of this is of course just from my personal experience, I used to have that same feeling of not being a contributing member anymore but my manager kept telling me it's not about coding anymore. I spent time on helping my team become efficient and share my process with them. In about 2 years, my team grew from 1 direct report to 8 direct reports and is now efficient and self governing that I don't really have to be hands on anymore. I recently had the time to actually take a greenfield project, I coded up the POC and now have 2 devs working on it with me acting in a "product role".

tldr: you might want to try a mindset shift, every dev you help mentor and unblock affects the productivity of the team and of the company as a result. Instead of optimizing code, you're optimizing processes and people.

Leading_Yoghurt_5323@reddit

this is normal tbh, tech lead is less coding and more people + decisions
but if coding is what you enjoy most, it’s totally fine to step back to senior or ask for a more hybrid role
nothing wrong with that

OriginalTangle@reddit

This is precisely why I never wanted to be a tech lead. Your story is just another data point that confirms my suspicions.

The flip side is that my career looks like it stagnated and I'm having trouble finding work after having been laid off recently. A former team mate found work as a tech lead in a company that rejected me recently.

You're probably going to be a decent tech lead but it's that what you want?

Side note: sounds like you were forced to do it. Is that how it happened?

anengineerandacat@reddit

Pretty normal, your moving from an individual who simply follows orders and contributes to the one actually tackling business problems.

The meetings, estimations, architecture sessions, and design sessions are IMHO the actual "engineering" element to software engineering.

Good place to be in with AI encroachment as well, ICs will have a rocky road ahead of them but any lead role or management role is an accountability position; the business needs that type of individual so they have a person to blame.

You wouldn't be promoted if they thought you couldn't do it, most companies have you generally involved in that space well before the actual promotion.

You will definitely be coding less though unless your willing to kill yourself and if you have good managers they'll basically tell you to delegate or even demand you delegate tasks; eventually you'll find you have no choice either, instead of triaging that defect in prod you'll be stuck in a critical estimation meeting and you'll have to send Bob to go look at it and report back to you.

RelativeVivid2857@reddit

Bro in my startup they pick me as team lead during 10month of experience even though others of same didn't get same opportunity because I got client hero employee of the quarter, and for the skills the pick me as tl. Although my team is small I feel like I want to work as IC for further skills in development

Sisaroth@reddit

I had a very different experience compared to most people here. My experience was that TL roles are not much different from senior devs. PMs are doing planning/admin stuff. TLs in my team never did any of that. They had more meetings yes, but those would always be technical meetings or meetings with the client about certain technical implementations that the client wanted to have different.

morosis1982@reddit

I struggle a bit with this also. As a technical lead, you'll be expected to take the lead on the technical direction as well as being (to borrow the phrase of some other commenters) a force multiplier for those you lead.

I do get to contribute, but at about half the capacity of the other team members on a good weeek, and less than that if there has been a recent release that has inspired challenges in the organisation (I do a lot of integration work, some client facing, and we don't always get the full picture before go live).

That said, there should be a certain amount of latitude for you to create your own tickets to ackle issues you believe need doing but may not be prioritised from a business sense. You may need to sell it to make it into a sprint, but I've been pretty successful once I can put some numbers on it. And having the latitude to work outside the sprint a little also allows me time to figure out what those metrics should be, design ways to track them and use it to give out platforms some love from the higher ups.

PothosEchoNiner@reddit

I’m a staff engineer and have been tech lead for years. You’re on the extreme end of a meeting heavy schedule. I’ve hardly ever had a week with as little as 4 hours for direct implementation work. It’s not always like this and it’s fair for you to push back on being requested to join so many meetings. Some people might just have you on their mental list of people to invite to everything whether or not it’s helpful.

Also is your manager going to stop you if you just assign tickets to yourself? You can just do things.

BillyBobJangles@reddit

The transition is very jarring, I dont think more time would make it less so.

I made the mistake of trying to stubbornly still take coding stories. It just becomae logistically impossible though.

You can still be involved in interesting work, but you may not get to do the funnest part of coding it.

Being a senior engineer is a lot more comfortable. Less ambiguity, you get 'wins' regularly by getting the new thing working and can feel good about it. Take a story, focus on it, and close it out.

A tech lead has to context switch constantly, that part alone is exhausting. But your impact can be greater by the descisions you help make in those collaboration meetings.

And it is really satisfying to work with and mentor junior engineers and see them transition into badass Seniors..You cant take all the credit of course but you at least have a part in it.

Your wins will be way less often now but they will be bigger wins. If you can live with that I'd stick it out.

Senior engineer is more comfortable, but if you want to grow into higher roles this is the step you have to take.

I know several people who are happy never being promoted beyond Senior.

The real question to ask yourself is how important that potential extra money is worth to you.

DinterRM@reddit

I've had the same dilemma for the last 2 years. Fnially I will return to an IC position at the same company. The only thing I regret is not switching back earlier.

tevs__@reddit

ICs solve individual problems that are in the scope of one person. All the Staff+ roles are designed to allow you to solve problems that require more than one person. You're still programming, but you use people instead of a keyboard most of the time.

How's your product person? Whether TL is a depressing chore where nothing gets done or a super enjoyable problem solving role with a high performing team often depends on your relationship.

If you want/need more free time for coding and you don't have it, well, you're the team lead, you tell people what to work on. You need to start delegating or deleting tasks to give yourself the daily agenda you need. Turn down meetings that have no agenda.

ephemeral_resource@reddit

I have some of these feelings as I started being made responsible for more of the team which leave less time to do the engineering I like to do. I'm perfectly happy doing the tech lead stuff but it is jarring because my frame of reference of my own productivity is some factor of LOC and MRs.

Just try to realize the mistakes your direction which helps people avoid each save the company tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in people's time and materials.

Tight_Perception8874@reddit

Exact same issue here Sir, 13 YOE who loved IC, but new company is pushing me to do Tech lead, so now working as acting lead

EfficientRaspberry31@reddit

Honestly, the best team leaders are reluctant leaders. Delegate the most interesting tasks. Instead of taking praise, give it to you your team. Your team will view you in higher regard when you accelerate their careers rather than focusing on project successes.

Understanding how to be a good team leader, the business decisions and the people, makes you a better developer.

Oh and think of being a team leader as a modern vibe coder. Where all your team are the AI agents, fuelled by positive emotions.

MishkaZ@reddit

So I am not a tech-lead at all. I have 6 yoe, am just a line engineer/mid-level whatever. However my tech lead was going through this problem in the beginning. He felt he was stuck in meetings way too much when what he really wanted to be doing was on the technical side of things. Help in architecture designs, mentor, pair programming, review code, etc. My team is a little junior heavy, so we needed someone else to help out (it really felt like my senior and I were spending more time mentoring/reviewing code than anything).

He spoke with the engineering manager and was basically granted that. EM took on more of the PM side of things, while tech lead took on more of the technical leading.

Maybe you should try to talk to your principle and see if you can work something like this out. There is no such thing as a standard team, and a lot of these titles are nebulous. Some teams are more senior heavy and thus don't really need handholding from a tech-lead, some are more junior heavy and need more mentors. Some are more mercenary like, helping out other teams and thus need a PM-like lead.

hungry_dawoodi@reddit

You can always schedule meetings with juniors as mentoring sessions..and then pair with them?

Also you can mentor the next level of senior dev. Mob with them and get your coding fix, while effectively dispatching your duty as force multiplier.

Majestic-Watch-2025@reddit

You're entering management. It feels weird, but the meetings and discussions are the job. Now it depends on if you like that or not.

gefahr@reddit

Worth noting that whether TL is "management" varies a lot between companies.

I struggle to think of a more ambiguous role in terms of how much it varies org by org.

I have seen where it's just the IC who calls the technical shots for a team, and I have also seen it mean "line manager who rarely codes", and everything in between.

Yeah but things like getting your day more filled with meetings, discussions with other teams, etc are on the way to it.

It's at least worth it for OP to think about whether he likes anything about management or wants to stay as an IC.

Seeing posts like this are interesting because I was so happy when I started getting involved with things like this and never wanted to "completing tickets and go home"

I agree with you on the "I was so happy" part, but also respect people who just want to stay heads down, too. Ideal org has a blend of both, otherwise you end up with too many cooks in the kitchen.

Of course! Just . . . I'm surprised that people don't just realize the opposite too - that just because they don't like this it doesn't mean its weird or wrong or whatever.

caboosetp@reddit

That's normal, unfortunately. Last time I was a lead, the only tickets I assigned to myself were ones that were like 5 points but could be finished two months from now. 2 months was still often optimistic. The higher you go, the less you will be coding.

Your goal now is to make sure the rest of your team is moving quickly. You taking on those meetings so the IC's on your team don't need to is absolutely huge. Helping get them unblocked so they can keep rolling is also huge. If I was to steal how AI would phrase it: you're no longer just a developer, you're a force multiplier! While it sounds cheesy, it's absolutely true.

The two best books for me as a lead were The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and Team Topologies. Five Dysfunctions is a narrative format that goes over some important things for how to make sure your team interactions are going well. Team Topologies is less directly useful, but helps give a lot of insight into how overarching business decisions are being made that put you in the position you are now, and what's expected of it.

blightr@reddit

Keep going. Management need people who question things.

The point is you have a team. If you do not know the answer, ask the team.