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

Devtalk
Reading something? Working on something? Planning something? Changing jobs even!? If you’re up for sharing, please let us know what you’...
1032 17402 381
New
Rainer
Have you seen the new features that will be available in the upcoming C# 9 release? C# is taking a lot of input from functional l...
New
AstonJ
Great paper by Igor Kopestenski on Erlang and GRiSP: Erlang as an Enabling Technology for Resilient General-Purpose Applications on Edge ...
New
AstonJ
Things like smart speakers (such Amazon Alexa), smart TVs or other devices with built in microphones, cameras or with other features that...
New
AstonJ
Hi everyone… I’m so sorry about the delay in getting this thread up, I’ve just been so busy :see_no_evil: Are there any book clubs you’d...
New
DevotionGeo
I hate having mandatory semicolons in a language, no matter how beautiful the language is otherwise. What about you?
New
AstonJ
Maybe a specific language or framework? Or a book or tool perhaps? What’s made your life easier and what do you think could make the live...
New
AstonJ
Do we have any digital nomads here? Anyone fancy it? If so, which countries would you consider? I’ve been toying with the idea for a wh...
New
AstonJ
Chris Seaton, the creator of TruffleRuby has died. It appears from suicide :cry: He left this note on Twitter on the weekend: And one...
New
DevotionGeo
Amazon CodeWhisperer is an alternative to GitHub Copilot, and it’s free!
New

Other popular topics Top

New
AstonJ
I’ve been hearing quite a lot of comments relating to the sound of a keyboard, with one of the most desirable of these called ‘thock’, he...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Rust is an exciting new programming language combining the power of C with memory safety, fearless concurrency, and productivity boosters...
New
AstonJ
Just done a fresh install of macOS Big Sur and on installing Erlang I am getting: asdf install erlang 23.1.2 Configure failed. checking ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
“Finding the Boundaries” Hero’s Journey with Noel Rappin @noelrappin Even when you’re ultimately right about what the future ho...
New
AstonJ
Biggest jackpot ever apparently! :upside_down_face: I don’t (usually) gamble/play the lottery, but working on a program to predict the...
New
Help
I am trying to crate a game for the Nintendo switch, I wanted to use Java as I am comfortable with that programming language. Can you use...
New
First poster: bot
The overengineered Solution to my Pigeon Problem. TL;DR: I built a wifi-equipped water gun to shoot the pigeons on my balcony, controlle...
New
New
AstonJ
This is a very quick guide, you just need to: Download LM Studio: https://lmstudio.ai/ Click on search Type DeepSeek, then select the o...
New