ohm

ohm

New Tech Lead - what do I need to know?

I just switched jobs to tech lead with a small team of about 6 other developer. This is my first tech lead job. What do I need to know? At first I won’t have people responsibilities (thus no 1-on-1s or career development for my peers), but only tech. Later those responsibilities will be added.

I found this to be a good read.

Any blog posts or even book recommendations? :smiley:

Most Liked

Hallski

Hallski

Congratulations on the new position!

The answer(s) to that question depends a bit on what kind of tech lead role you will have. In my experience the term “tech lead” isn’t as universally defined as many other roles and I have seen very different roles all have the name tech lead.

In most places I have experience with, a tech lead role is not a management position, rather that is a separate tech/engineering manager role but it sounds like it’s included in your role description (at least in the future).

Which other responsibilities are included that you know of?

rustkas

rustkas

I think the book “Herding Cats: A Primer for Programmers Who Lead Programmers” is one of the first that you need to read and repeatedly refer to in your daily work.
Book ideas will help you set up your work and organize your workflow.

AstonJ

AstonJ

Ooo congrats @ohm! What kind of projects will you be working on?

I’m not sure if it’s what you’re looking for, but @jrothman has written some books that you might find interesting:

The latter two are not specific to programming/tech leads but might be worth a look all the same :smiley:

I clicked through and thought oh great it’s got 4 stars… then scrolled down to the first review :joy:

I was going to say that I agree with @Hallski too, so thanks for clarifying! It looks like you’ll be overseeing the tech side of things then, such as deciding what languages, frameworks, methodologies to use etc? In which case you probably have most of this covered anyway (due to your experience and interest in the field) but an area where you might need to brush up on is planning and communicating, perhaps specifically outlining things for the benefit of others (such as the roadmaps you mentioned). Again I’m not sure whether they’re the perfect fit, but a couple of other books from Johanna might be worth a look!

The funny thing is when I saw your thread and that you were looking for books on the topic I wondered whether there would be many to choose from - seems like there’s a lot! If you read any please let us know how you get on! :+

Where Next?

Popular General Dev topics Top

AstonJ
Thought it might be worth having a dedicated thread for standing desk treadmills (for those interested, here’s our general thread on stan...
New
AstonJ
Just been adding some more portals, currently have the following languages: Apache Groovy C C# C++ Clojure CoffeeScript Crystal ...
New
New
Exadra37
I am a Linux user since 2012, more or less, and I always use Ubuntu on my computers, and my last 2 laptops have been used Thinkpads, wher...
New
AstonJ
Do the test and post your score :nerd_face: :keyboard: If possible, please add info such as the keyboard you’re using, the layout (Qw...
New
jamiedumont
This is all going to be a bit hand-wavey and straight off the top of my head, so bear with me, but it’s a thought/debate that’s been ratt...
New
TwistingTwists
Hello Fellow developers, I have been trying to wrap my head around How difficult would it have been to be a dev 20-30 years ago? I have...
New
foxtrottwist
A few weeks ago I started using Warp a terminal written in rust. Though in it’s current state of development there are a few caveats (tab...
New
OvermindDL1
Maybe we need a thread of hosting providers we like and for what reasons. I personally like OVH, they are a very low level host (they re...
New
Margaret
Hello DevTalk Community! Once again, The Pragmatic Programmers are looking for developers who’d like to help shape the future of our boo...
New

Other popular topics Top

Devtalk
Hello Devtalk World! Please let us know a little about who you are and where you’re from :nerd_face:
New
AstonJ
Thanks to @foxtrottwist’s and @Tomas’s posts in this thread: Poll: Which code editor do you use? I bought Onivim! :nerd_face: https://on...
New
Exadra37
I am asking for any distro that only has the bare-bones to be able to get a shell in the server and then just install the packages as we ...
New
Exadra37
Oh just spent so much time on this to discover now that RancherOS is in end of life but Rancher is refusing to mark the Github repo as su...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Create efficient, elegant software tests in pytest, Python's most powerful testing framework. Brian Okken @brianokken Edited by Kat...
New
mafinar
This is going to be a long an frequently posted thread. While talking to a friend of mine who has taken data structure and algorithm cou...
New
AstonJ
If you’re getting errors like this: psql: error: connection to server on socket “/tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432” failed: No such file or directory ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Explore the power of Ash Framework by modeling and building the domain for a real-world web application. Rebecca Le @sevenseacat and ...
New
AstonJ
Curious what kind of results others are getting, I think actually prefer the 7B model to the 32B model, not only is it faster but the qua...
New
NewsBot
Node.js v22.14.0 has been released. Link: Release 2025-02-11, Version 22.14.0 'Jod' (LTS), @aduh95 · nodejs/node · GitHub
New