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! :+

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