Tech Lead Q&A and Videos

Recently, while working on a project that is very open-ended, I realized part way through the project that the initial solution I had come up with for the problem would work only partially and in order to solve the problem fully, I would actually need double the amount of time I had estimated earlier. Since the initial estimate was in months, I feel really terrible about this. I made sure to report this to my chain as soon as I discovered this, but I'm curious: how common is it for others to miss their estimates? I'd like to gauge whether I am alone in this situation. Furthermore, how do people typically manage the disappointment and pressure that arise from missed deadlines, especially in exploratory or open-ended projects?

Hi Taro,

I've just been lucky enough to receive an official promotion to Team Lead for my current team. It's a small company (~100 total headcount) and a small team, and I feel like my manager and I have very tight alignment as do I and the rest of the team, and thankfully there's no obvious/major problems (i.e. interpersonal problems, poor performers, etc). However this is the first time I've ever had direct reports or really been in any form of an official leadership role, and I'm concerned I'm going to instantly run into obvious traps/issues as a result.

I've read "Engineering Management for the rest of us" by Sarah Drasner, which has been really helpful in thinking about the role, but I'm really interested in hearing any advice people can provide to help me avoid fanning any hidden flames.

Context

I have secured a job offer as a Tech Lead at Zepto - a series F startup based out of India.

The company is operating in quick commerce space which is like e-commerce in 10 minutes using Demand Prediction and Dark Stores in a certain region.

Career Aspirations

I have aspirations for career growth as an IC and the HR were rolling out offer for Staff as well, but stuck with Lead Software Engineer for now, so as to establish myself better first and then move towards staff role.

The Hiring Manager mentioned that it is possible to quickly progress to staff role in 4-5 months, which is a pure IC based role while Lead Software Engineer involved some level of team task prioritisation/planning etc. also

I had been trying to move ahead to Lead Software Engineer position in my previous company for a lot of years and did not get enough support.

Thus, I am really grateful to this offer and just want to give my best.

Would love any hear your thoughts on how to succeed as a Tech Lead.

Introductory call with CTO

With the context setup, The introductory calls are being scheduled now each coming week.

The first call being with the Company CTO.

I want to be able to have good learning and career growth at the company.

What are some of the questions I can ask as a to be Tech Lead at Zepto so as to make the best use of my call with him?

I was thinking about the following:

• What are some of the focus areas for us at Zepto in 2024?
• Does this translate to some high level focus areas for engineering teams? - such as building abstractions or a platform using which we can enable business better?
• Are there some technical hindrances that are being faced to achieve the focus areas for the business? or What could be some reasons to not be able to achieve above focus areas? And how are we planning to preempt them?
• Are there some areas of improvement you are seeing from an operational perspective in Tech & Product teams? Are we doing anything towards that?

Would love to hear your thoughts on the above. And hear more about the things I can discuss in the call.

My goal is to succeed as a Tech Lead for my team at Zepto, contribute as much as I can in terms of impact and learn from the experience.

References in comments due to character limit

My new manager, my old manager, and the broader team have been managing the on-call rotation for the platform of my company's flagship product, which we launched two years ago. Initially, the rotation included just 3 engineers, but after discussions with my directors and acknowledgment from the rest of the organization, we increased it to 8 engineers to form a healthier on-call rotation.

Despite having 8 engineers, I've noticed that many team members, including our principal and staff engineers, are still not familiar with the on-call procedures. I have compiled a support run-book log documenting the steps for handling each issue/alert, so the on-call team understands the severity and business impact of different issues. The issues can range from low priority to business-critical.

However, the support run-book documentation is not entirely reliable as the ultimate source of truth because our production system support behaves more like triage than a debug system.

Additionally, the nature of the on-call rotation can vary from simply acknowledging alerts and following documented steps to collaborating with business owners. Sometimes, issues are caused by other teams or third-party vendors, making them unsolvable by the on-call engineer alone. I noticed that Production Issue happened almost daily, and the on-call issues have impacts to company's revenues and customer facing experience..

I am interested in learning more about how others view a healthy on-call rotation.

What are the key factors to consider when forming a healthy on-call rotation?

I'm starting an API migration project due to a licensing issue and am the primary point of contact for stakeholders.

I earned this responsibility by building a relationship with the downstream legacy team and leveraging their solution with ours, using our framework in a novel way. My manager quote said “not that you can you should own the xfn”.

This is my first time doing non-technical work. Here’s what I've done so far:

• Created a step-by-step plan and design document, captured requirements with due dates, and integrated tasks into Agile sprints.
• Maintain a living document for future technical challenges, and note taking for all steps I outlined.
• Outlined the battle plan to the po, my manager, and the senior engineer who all gave sign off.
• Plan to give updates and assist with troubleshooting for client teams.
• Set a goal to thoroughly test the solution, ensuring an adequate test suite is in place, aiming for it to work on the first try.

Questions:

• For cross-functional alignment, what steps should I take for communication and updates? We have a Slack group with all clients. If there’s a communication template that worked well for similar projects, it would be helpful.
• If there was one thing you'd challenge me to do in my execution of this project, what would it be? For context, I’m probably mid-level with an interest in learning how to grow.

Hello Taro!

I'm working as tech lead in company of approximately 500 people, we are creating tech products both internally and for external clients with a data-science focus.

As part of my yearly objectives, I'm working on improving technical architecture decisions across the company, and I'm looking for best practices, advice and references on the subject.

In the past we have faced some issues such as:

• tech lead looking for feedback on a target architecture not finding anyone willing/ready to do so
• an internal product whose code was so poor it had to be almost completely rewritten.
• teams struggling to solve a problem that had been already solved in other part of the company.

Actions I have been considering:

• encouraging the use of Architecture Decision Records
• set-up a team of senior technical profiles that could be mobilised to review an architecture

In general I'm weary of any solution that would:

• remove accountability from engineers
• create coupling between unrelated projects
• add a lot of meetings

Thanks a lot!

I've been working at this company for almost 2 years now and we recently started doing kick-off calls for big features. Before this, management would come up with features in private meetings and assign engineers tickets. We expressed our frustration with this approach so management started doing "kick-off calls" recently but would only invite 1 engineer or 1 data scientist depending on who they think should lead the feature/project. This is a 10-person company, and it feels like I have no room to be creative/propose solutions etc. I brought this up during retro and 1:1s with my manager and the answer I always got was "we don't want it to be a democracy" or "too many people/questions would drag the meeting longer than it has to" etc

I can understand this reasoning if it's a big team/company, but we're a really small team and it feels to me like they're not interested in hearing about other engineers' input, ideas etc at all. This causes me to think engineers are just here to do grunt work/grind. Am I being too cynical?

I joined Amazon for my first tech job as an SDE I and was able to promote to SDE II after 1 year. Fast forward to 9 months after promotion, My onboarding buddy who has been here ever since the team was founded is leaving. I ended up being the SME for one of the team's projects that makes a lot of $$$, which means a lot of eyes are on it. Although we do have a couple SDE IIIs on the team, they've been more focused on other equally important projects and don't have too much knowledge on this one. I'm starting to feel the weight of the extra responsibility as I often get pinged for escalations, have a lot more say in meetings, and invited to meetings for the roadmap of this project. There was also a recent reshuffle in the Product side and I've become their go-to guy for anything related to this project.

Having joined the industry less than 2 years ago, I kind of feel like things are really moving fast and I'm a bit overwhelmed to be honest. I was still thinking on how to increase my technical depth after promotion, and I'm not even sure if this is a good situation to be in or not. But at the same time, I do want to overcome this and perhaps turn this situation into a growth opportunity.

In my forte review, there were many comments on the expectation of me evolving into a mature leader for the team and this feels like an opportunity to work on that. I'm kind of confused on what direction to take at the moment. What would be some things I can do to make the most of this opportunity and grow my leadership skills? I feel like before all this happened, I was focusing on growing my technical skills and didn't really pay atttention much to the leadership side.

This might be a vague question, so I just wanted to see if anyone has been in this situation and have any advice on how to best navigate this or share similar experiences