Tech Lead Q&A and Videos

Even though starting to work for a big company like Meta, Amazon, Google, etc. I believe is a hard to achieve (I haven't work for) somehow it looks pretty straightforward. Learn for interview, get the job, level up. Yes, I am sure it's hard and not many will do it but still you know what should be done (yes, may don't know how). But let me tell you a different story: I work in a not that famous country in the EU and non of the top tech companies is there. Actually 90+% of the companies are outsourcing companies. As a SE with 10 years of experience in the outsourcing world I can tell you how it works: you work on a legacy code which is so old and so bad (hundreds of people have tried write code there) you can't see good practice at all, no code reviews (sometimes there is bad it is very rare), no unit tests, performance review is only about client's feedback and so on, you got the point. It's about the money only and nobody cares if you are good or not if the client is happy. In very rare cases I have started something from scratch but all of my colleagues were so bad progmmers like myself that we messed up all. It's a deadlock. After 10 years I realized I am a bad programmer and I've seen so many bad practices that I have no passion to do anything anymore. Now to the questions: Is it possible to apply best standards in an outsourcing company like those in FAANG and if yes, how? How can I fill all the gaps I have at the moment? Can I fill all the gaps with side projects only? How can I fill them when nobody will teach me anything new. Nowone will review my code and like @Alex said, they are the main source to learn :) How would I know is the code good or not? Could it be better? The ultimate goal of my career (and maybe in life) is to fill the gap not only in my skills but to create a company (product based or outsourcing) where everyone who join to have a chance to become a great programmer. But before helping others, I need to help myslelf. This is how I found Taro.

I am the only experienced Full Stack developer in the team and I felt that the management got a bit excited when they found out. For the first week I was asked to represent my team to the UI review committee to get the UI approval, I had little or no background of the feature but it was kind of rushed out. Second week, I was told to write the design document of a feature which I was not aware of. I started digging deeper into it, but after 3-4 days I was told there is some other team who is working on something similar so I should stop working on it. Third week, I was told to again start working on it but then was told to put it on hold. Within the same week I was also told to write the Engineering document for the FE development for the team, this was a bit surprising for me seeing there is almost everything custom at SF, I felt I needed some time to understand the ecosystem, it is the work in progress.

I recently became CTO of a small early-stage startup where I'm leading all technical efforts, including by still doing some coding, but am mostly managing other engineers and focusing on the broader technical needs of the company. Previously, I was a technical lead and IC at startups where I had led small teams of other software engineers on product development, but was more in the weeds technically/coding a lot and was not responsible for people management. I'd like to learn about resources I can utilize to further develop my engineering leadership and people management skills. What resources would you recommend to learn more about the following: How to build people management skills as a first time engineering people manager? Are there open source or free trainings or resources that are good for this? The latest engineering leadership topics, especially in a startup environment (e.g. how other leaders are tackling common technical and leadership challenges) How to meet or connect with other engineering managers/leaders (e.g. startup CTOs, VP of engineering, or technical founders) outside my company to learn from their experiences or share lessons or knowledge with each other Interested in any types of resources including blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, or virtual or in-person communities or meetups (particularly in NYC) etc. I have some favorite resources so far, but it would be great to learn about what resources others in the Taro community find useful. Thanks!

I’m given a particular problem that has been estimated during a sprint planning meeting by the team. Halfway through the sprint I find that there is a lot more to the task than the team had initially predicted/estimated and I raise this concern in the stand up If the “extra work” is out of the scope of the initial task, a new task can be added to the backlog otherwise we generally maintain the estimate and let the team velocity adjust accordingly Curious as to how other teams handle these situations ?

I'm an E5 at a Big Tech company. My EM's pushing me to lead projects on our team so I can work on getting to E6. This is challenging when the E6 on my team tries to micromanage everything. How do I lead when I keep getting overruled? The E6 usually makes good decisions, but oftentimes struggles to articulate his rationale / justification.

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:- My team is going to work on a new project which involves upgrading a service and migrating/enabling all of the dependents to use the new service. This service provides a business critical functionality for our teams and the new version attempts to solve a lot of high impact pain points with the previous version. We have just inherited this service and none of us have worked with it or any of its dependents before. We have some support from the previous team that worked on this project but only in a consultation capacity. This is a project that has been attempted multiple times by various teams over the years - unsuccessfully or with little progress. My perception is that it's going to be a difficult project with low-moderate chances of success. There is a lot documentation but most of it is somewhat outdated. There are a lot of PRs as well but these are for the unsuccessful attempts so I'm not sure how impactful it would be to go through them. The plans for the previous attempts only had internal milestones for the team and a single big-bang completion milestone for stakeholders. Questions:- How can I identify smaller, independent high-level milestones that are relevant for external stakeholders? How can I come up with broad estimates and capacity requirements for the external and internal milestones if I'm not clear on what these milestones would require for completion? How can I think about de-risking this attempt of the project and improving the probability of success?

tldr; I am a Tech Lead working in of the big tech giants, getting burnt out due to office politics and ignorant managers. I am one of the few people (~20) who accidentally was made remote, this was the result of one of the irresponsible move from one of the tech giant. Anyways, I was part of a team for almost more than a year and the company culture was a bit shocking to me as my manager refused to do 1:1, lack of quality work and ignorance because of me being the remote was evident. Six months before I, including my team, was transferred to another team with a greenfield project (with little or no prior info), we worked really hard but after 3-4months, another reshuffling happened and most of the team was moved to other projects/team. After couple of months the team was finally dismantled, I thought we will go back to our original team but to my surprise, instead of retaining me, they hired two new lead engineers in their location. In between all of this I was surprised to know that my manager (previous) didn't fill my annual review, when I tried to contact him I didn't get any response. I also scheduled a meeting with him but he didn't show up. Few weeks before, I was moved to another team, which I found was in the mid of big release. The Principal engineer who was responsible for the design and architecture of the system was moved out before I joined so there was no knowledge sharing per se. I tried to contact him but he is too busy to entertain me now. During the first couple of days, my new manager briefed me that I am the owner of this new project and I have to look after each and everything. The project in itself is very huge: It was in design phase since last 1 year, and it depends on 2-3 teams. Everyday I am pulled into random meetings where there is a lot of alignment going on with some crucial decision making as the project is going to be live in new few months. In the daily sprint the manager wants to make sure I have enough work assigned to me as well. In two weeks I am almost burnt out as I have little or no time left after hours of meeting and going through the random documents. Recently I came to know that there will a week long in-person workshop to get an alignment on the various decisions on the current project and I am not invited, I pinged my manager for the same but there is a long silence. As of now, I have little or no breathing space to prepare for the interviews and almost on the verge of burnout. Few important points: To my surprise my official manager is still the same manager (first team) and he has still not filled up my performance review. I moved countries because of personal issues so leaving the company may not be easy as of now. I have a lot of financial responsibilities, plus the current market and immigration condition has made the condition worse.

I've never worked in big tech or Tier 1 companies but I'm aiming to grow as a engineer and would like to know and learn how different companies make such decisions? Does it vary for startups and FAANG+ companies? How do you answer such a question if asked during an interview? How much autonomy each senior engineer (L5 or L6) has in such decisions? Could you please share an example case study here? What does the entire process look like? Thank you.

I’m currently working on a 0 to 1 project that’s outside of the team’s scope, so I have no senior engineer on the team to support me and tell me what to do. I have to spend a lot of time piecing things together and it's been rough - I've missed on the team's ship goals as it's hard to move fast enough on this project. How can I make this situation better?

I went through the course from Jocelin and kudos to her for doing a great job at articulating everything so well. But I was wondering at the same time if there are any differences in leading a tech team at a startup (100 engineers company) vs a FAANG company?

I'm an E5 iOS engineer at a Big Tech company. I'm struggling to understand what leadership means. A Director told me Leadership means making sure the project is successful no matter what happens. As a result, I often end up doing other people's jobs for them (e.g., when a backend engineer struggles to get their piece working, I often hand-held them and have even created backend PRs to unblock some projects even though I'm an iOS engineer). However, a mentor told me that E6's don't do the work themselves but delegate it to others to scale themselves. If this is true, then what does an E6 do when working with engineers who are either unwilling or unable to complete their deliverables in the expected timeframe and quality? This becomes even more challenging when working cross-functionally with engineers who are not on my team. Also, how do you lead when you're not the DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) / tech lead for a project (e.g., when the tech lead is an E6 on another team, but is not setting up the team for success by refusing to communicate requirements clearly)?

Hi all I recently joined an organization as a senior where I was made tech lead within 3 months of joining. This was somewhat related to recognition of my work among product and my peers. I advocated for good engineering practices such as automated integration testing and established projects for cross org collaborations to help deliver whats important for the organization. All of this was quickly realized as a super critical projects by the organization. I created tech specs and prototypes for these projects. However recently the organization hired a principal engineer. since he was new I volunteered to help him onboard and asked for his advice on the new super business critical project that was next in our todo team pipeline. He is an ambitious guy so he wants to create his mark in the organization. But for some reason the way he is approaching it doesn't seem right to me. He plans to create a new team taking over the business critical project while splitting the newly formed team I lead on the same project that I helped him ramp up on. I opposed to this asking for rationale for a new team. there seem to be now two impressions of my work:- 1) held by my peers, folks I lead and product manager of good business delivery and product timelines. I am respected among both. 2) the principal Engineer tries to devalue my work in front of senior engg. Leadership saying things like I am overcommitting and under delivering if I do this project with the existing members of my team in public and in front of senior engg leadership. The automated integration testing project which no one was doing before and we were starting from a basic version to iterate on. This is now communicated to engg management as every team is trying to do their own testing. My engg management for some reason is siding with him since he has 15-20 years of experience and i have 5. He also is principal and i am 2-3 levels below him. for some reason I am being micromanaged with no fault of mine. From engg management perspective I have been just told to lead the project that I am currently leading and just help the team formed by principal engg to start the project. I have communicated my expectations of being able to continue leading the project. Product is in support of that but engg managment isnt. I have also tried giving feedback to the principal engineer that his actions are disruptive to the team and becauase of what he is doing he is slowing us down and blocking us from doing critical projects. My worry is despite doing the hard work the project I have the most context on and I worked on for a while is being given to someone else and second i will not be given credit for the hard work I am doing. Should I just change teams. I dont want to leave my existing team because I do think they need me but I feel I would rather create more impact where I dont have to swim against the tide. I may also be suffering from sunken cost fallacy here where I knew I led the development of a new critical project Tia for your help.

Hi all, I am going to transfer to Tiktok as a lead MLE next month. I have 2 months notice period and I was wondering if anyone has any checklists on what I should do during transition so that I can start fresh and ramp up quickly. I come from FAANG background and going to a startup-ish culture is an exciting but scary prospect for me (especially with the reduced work life balance). Tips and checklists of links to Taro videos or other resources are welcome. Thank you

I work in a Big Blue team that needs to go through many layers of approvals to ship anything. Sometimes we'll be working on a project for 1-2 halves and then the approvals will be pulled back, torpedoing the project. What can I do to improve the process here, so my team can ship more?

I'm a tech lead on a long-running project that has gathered momentum over the last couple of months after being in a slow death phase for a many months. Recently, a couple of senior engineers joined the team and we've gotten rid of a lot of things that were slowing down the project. We've managed to hit many awesome milestones on time as a consequence. The project is nearing it's endgame phase but we've unfortunately hit a snag in this last leg due to which it seems that we'll be missing the last couple of deadlines by a decent margin. Due to the expectations that we've set by consistently delivering on time for all the previous milestones, our manager has suggested "pushing" to meet the last couple of deadlines. I don't want to ask my team to work overtime or on the weekend to meet these deadlines (especially since we've been doing a great job of turning the project around and delivering on time). How can I push back against it in a manner that does not impact my currently ongoing or future performance reviews?

Hi Taro, I'm cross posting this from the premium slack because it was raised that the answers might help the broader community. I work for a small company - the engineering org is approximately 60-70 people all told. The company is about a decade old, but has grown more recently, and I joined the small SRE/Developer Tooling team within the last year. Historically, the company has operated at a relatively slow pace, and followed practices that are, politely, out of date. Just to give an example of the kind approach the company takes: We operate out of a single AWS Region, with no DR or failover capabilities infrastructure was provisioned ad-hoc and manually, with effectively no Infrastructure as code Developers would typically bypass deployment pipelines to manually update files or run commands, even for production systems QA is primarily manually performed for our SaaS application. There is some automation, but this is something that QA runs and checks the output, instead of automatically tracking the output in some way. In my role, I've been pushing for change where possible, trying to evangelize the better ways of working, such as Infrastructure as Code, logs sent to a centralized location like Splunk, and deploying to other AWS regions to assist in both regional lag and general DR/failover concerns. Thankfully, there's definitely some purchase there by leadership, at least on a high level, as they're generally receptive to these changes and recognize that they cannot continue with the same old practices. However, this mentality doesn't appear to be flowing through to the rest of the engineering organisation. My team and I are repeatedly asked to revert changes we've made, often because developers are merely used to the way things used to be, or because PMs/teams want to stick to a schedule or speed that was only possible via shortcuts (such as manually provisioned infrastructure). All of this has happened despite repeated public comments by some in leadership against those requests specifically. What can I do to push for these kinds of changes, when I'm not in any kind of official management or leadership position? I have no official power beyond a general remit by my manager to uphold certain standards for my team.

For context, I work in a tech lead role where I am often making recommendation to my manager regarding the projects coming down the line. The EM has the final say on this, but they respect my opinion on this matter so I don't want to mess this up. I also have 1:1s with my teammates whom I am responsible for about their career growth goals. My teammates are all the same eng level, but have different levels of competence and desire to learn. Additionally, I also know it's important for me to leave some room/ambiguity in project investigation stages to allow folks the space to grow, while it's also important for me to take on some challenging work and help our team deliver more quickly. I guess my question is really 2 parts: How do I choose what to delegate? How do I choose who to delegate the work to?

Some engineers like to code, some like to manage projects, some like to stay close to the users. Software Engineers come in all shapes and sizes. What are the major archetypes of Software Engineers and how can one identify one's own archetype to double down and improve.

I’m an E5 on a platform team at a Big Tech company. I'm under aggressive timelines to create a proof-of-concept (POC) for a partner team. My skip-level emphasized the importance of this POC as well as its timeliness to me. Our team's E6 is coding our platform infrastructure and is slipping his dates. The E6 said his infra code should be production ready in 2 weeks, but claimed there should be enough there to unblock my POC. I tried to forge ahead, but my POC is now delayed because I spent so much time trying to work around the deficiencies in our platform infrastructure. I eventually decided to prioritize some other parts of the POC to avoid losing more time while the E6 is taking his time with the infra work. How much of this should I communicate to our partner team's stakeholder? I'm hoping that I'll be able to hunker down to get the project back on track without slipping our dates. Another E5 on our team told me that he doesn't like to air our team's dirty laundry outside our team, so he usually says everything is fine until the last week of the project when he suddenly flags delays. Is this a good strategy? Or should I be honest and upfront with cross-functional partners external to my team?

Currently, we have tech debt mainly discoverable via a custom annotation in the code. Some examples are: Break complex features into separate manageable flows Split large classes or controllers Feature/part refactoring tickets with linked ticket numbers. The core tech debt is easy to address and manageable via project boards, but the problem is the rest (product related) often gets out of date and never gets resolved, for which there are some reasons like: The product team has been disbanded. Feature no longer a priority for the product. The part of the code has not been touched for some time but could come into active development again. Find better implementation of X I believe the product-related tech debt should be owned and tracked by the product team but often there are some tech debts left in favor of speed like - breaking complex screens, and classes, and find better approaches etc etc What's the best way to promote ownership and address such tech debt, so that they are addressed during code reviews and not left in the code as comments indefinitely, nor as a ticket in some project board which never addressed?

Say you want to research on a topic for resolving an issue and want to share with the team by creating a Google Doc. How does one master the skill of creating an high quality Doc? My Senior team member, top performer, is super solid at creating Google Docs and churns out one great doc almost every week. He said he just focuses on just dumping out the thoughts in the first go and fixes them later on. But I feel his velocity in getting that doc out or completely the research on it is very fast. So clearly there is something that I am not understanding. So I am looking for opinions from experts on Taro :)