Tech Lead Q&A and Videos

We currently have a problem with test flakes happening very often. Someone is currently working on a systemic fix, but in the meantime, I've taken it upon myself to be the leader in categorizing and assigning people to take on some of the existing flakes as they happen. I am assigning based on who has the most context or who wrote the original test. My question is: How can I assign these in a way that doesn't cause people to dislike me? I ask as someone who needs to delegate in my role but also needs to get buy-in for various initiatives so its important that people like me. A couple of things I've tried: Trying to be as helpful as possible, showing that as I'm assigning these I've done a little bit of investigation myself to try to fix it (even without much context) or give any info I can gather Asking in a polite way (maybe)? Here's a couple examples: - "@person, I saw this one flake a few times and noticed you were the original author. Would you be able to take a look when you get a chance?" - "@person it looks like we attempted to fix this here (link to github commit) but it seems to still be flaking. If it's ok, I'm gonna assign this one to you." Any better wording of the "ask" or advice around this situation would be appreciated!

I've grown to be more of a "tech lead"-style E5, which leads to a lot of time spent roadmapping and talking to people instead of actually executing on the project and being more hands-on. My team is heavier on the E3/E4 side, so I'm able to delegate a lot of the coding work away. I was wondering if this was normal for Meta and whether this is an okay way to operate as an E5?

I've done various presentations throughout my career, and I always get stressed out doing them. I'll make slides/a script beforehand and pull all-nighters the day before. I'm okay presenting in front of smaller groups, but it's hard in front of larger groups. How can I get more comfortable with this, especially with higher stakes presentations like those trying to get buy-in from a large group of senior+ engineers and tech leads?

I would like to understand how can I drive an effective Tech discovery session (just had a PRD walkthrough) with the team (remotely working) before we start writing a detailed system design document. The engineers are mostly L4 and are still learning how to effectively collaborate instead of full blown meeting.

My sub-team was 3 people (an L5 tech lead, an L4 engineer, and me), but now it’s just me since the others left. My manager is hiring other people in the coming months. How can I best onboard the new people and set myself up to lead the team?

I recently completed a project where I was the sole IC on the project. The project mainly involved migrating logic from a legacy service but involved integrating with a service managed by another team. I was responsible for the design of solution, estimating a timeline and delivery of the project (writing the code and testing). Unfortunately, I ran into errors last minute and had to communicate delays a day before the expected completion date. We also ran into a tricky error post launch but I failed to communicate an expected deadline after the cause of the bug was identified. My manager and I have spoken on potential strategies and the need to communicate expected completion time. My question here: What can I do a better in the future? When driving a project, how are you structuring your work so errors are surfaced as early as possible? How are you communicating risks and concerns that come up during a project?

We use JIRA for writing up tasks, which the respective engineers always make, but there is no sprint. So, we need more sprint retrospection. All communications are done very vaguely via a Slack message, sometimes a word with little but no context or a screenshot. I want you to know that I'm concerned about communicating this request for proper planning with my manager.

Over the past year, we've focused on developing our product quickly, which has led to a significant amount of technical debt in our codebase. As a result, we've shipped applications without proper architecture and planning. However, when I suggest refactoring or re-architecting to my team, many of the senior developers and the engineering manager are skeptical. In my opinion, I am not just offering refactoring for just sake of refactoring; it's necessary because our current code base lacks abstraction and separation of concerns and has slow development times. Examples: Adding a new column to the database takes 1-2 days Or changing some code breaks another part of the application(lack of separation of concerns and abstraction) Another example, recently I introduced integration tests to our team because we manually tested a lot of stuff on staging before deployment, in that case, my EM's argument was integration tests are very slow to run on every build. In those examples, how can I reduce skepticism in my team and bring more productivity, and more good code quality, and best practices to my team?

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

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 cold emailed Tech Lead of a small startup (series A) and got the chance to have a coffee chat with them. How can I ensure that I have an effective coffee chat and it doesn't sound like an interview? I found an open position for that company. So my real goal is to get a referral/hope that the HM is the contact. But obviously I don't plan to be upfront with mentioning a referral/the position and only bring it up towards the end. But putting the referral bit aside, I am also genuinely interested in learning about their career, what they do, and understanding the technical aspects of the problems they are working with Finally I would like to give value to them back as well, but there's only so much I can do as a junior. How can I give them value? Other things I will do: Be respectful of their time Ensure I am clear about what I'm looking for from the coffee-chat (excluding the referral) Following the Taro guidelines on being thankful and effective communication strategies Avoiding asking generic questions Finally Alex says, good communication is all about understanding the other person's incentives. wrt a coffee chat, what is the incentive for a tech lead? I'm sure a good part of it is paying it forward. But if anyone would be willing to highlight the incentive of a tech lead, I would greatly appreciate it!

I recently started a new job as the most senior engineer in my tech stack. In my second month I was given complex tasks which are mix of implementing a missing feature and evaluating option available to solve very niche set of problems. These are all problems in the domain of openGl and low level graphics programming language, which I have zero experience. So most of time is going to reading and understanding the space.There are no other engineers who are expert in the space either however they have done some work. My concern is this kind of work does not have a tangible results which could hinder the probation evaluation. I am struggling with giving updates as I am spending lot of time just to understand what needs to be done and for how part I need to learn a low level graphics language which will take lot of time. I already raised it with my manager once but he did not seem to understand yet. how can I raise it again and raise my concern. Also show some progress In my work, even struggling to give standup updates at times since domain is very vast.

I've been working as a software developer in federal government for the last 5 years with the last 2 being primarily within an innovation division. Over those years I solo developed many internal projects; initially during downtime/upskilling time and later on doing it fulltime. Each one of these I believe could of had a profound impact on internal processes and ways of working which would then have a positive knock-on effect to the general public. However these projects never saw a big enough audience that could have that sort of positive impact. No matter how much the users or executive would love the product/s - the endorsement would only ever go as far as a good CV piece or getting to work on what I wanted. From what I've heard this is different in big tech. (ala Paul Buchheit w/ gmail) But is it really like that and if so, how can you encourage institutions that are not known for risk taking and innovation to change?

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.

So, a new situation has come up at work. My lead let me know today that he/she is going on a parental leave around October last week. I did ask them to let me know if I need to step up and need to prepare anything before they leave. Question is How do I handle this situation and work with my directors to get prepared for it. I don't feel prepared to replace them for the next 3 -4 months nor I think I'm expected to do that but the question here is how can I proactively reach out, prepare and help the team in this situation.

I'm at a company where we are migrating from AWS to Snowflake due to Snowflake's simplicity and cost savings. The Team responsible for the migration and in charge of Snowflake is led by a guy who is difficult to work with. He's not unpleasant, but if he gets you on the phone, he loves to talk and take up a ton of time. I was literally on a call with him for 2 hours yesterday because he goes off on tangents and likes to hear himself talk. He also has a bit of an accent which makes it harder to understand him. So he's a Director and leader of that team and I'm a Data Engineer on an adjacent team. As part of the migration to Snowflake, he had the company agree to license a piece of 3rd party software to move data into Snowflake. This piece of software is one that none of the Engineers in the department want to use: it's old, closed-source, no one knows it and is a dead-end on a resume. On top of that, I'm pretty sure it's completely unnecessary! I think Snowflake provides a way of getting data into it that works as well. The biggest thing is the cost! It's a whopping percentage of our cloud spend! This director had a good relationship with the VP of my department (my former skip) who was the one who signed off on the 3rd-party software but recently left. I was discussing the situation with a colleague today and realized that since my former skip is no longer around, I could potentially make the case to my new skip, which could earn my plaudits. It's an easy way to save the company a pile of money every year (multiples of my salary). So I'm thinking of doing a POC of how I can replace the 3rd-party. I mentioned this to my manager today, and he said we already have a 3 year contract with the vendor. I think he's resigned to the idea that we're locked in for 3 years. If I can reproduce the functionality of the 3rd party software (just bringing in data into Snowflake), should I make the case to my new skip (who doesn't know me yet)? I'm assuming I should go through my manager first. Should I try and share the credit with my coworkers who also don't want to use the 3rd party and would probably back me up? Thanks!

I am taking Lalit Kundu's course on TL Blueprint on Taro right now. Thanks for creating it. :) I had a question since I joined as a "first time tech lead" in my company. Before this, my official title was Senior Software Engineer. It's been a month for me in my new company and I had the chance to contribute to multiple threads. But could not directly have as major code contributions as I previously did. Wanted to understand if this is normal as a tech lead. In fact, most of my time goes reviewing designs and code rather than coding myself. Actively trying to seek out / create such opportunities now for myself, like a deployment freeze manager I am planning to create so that deployments can get blocked or go through an additional layer of approval during freeze. But there are several other burning things like lack of proper observability etc. which may not directly need me to code. Thus, would be helpful to get any related advice on how I should approach this. Below is a short pie chart I created for things I worked on in my first month of joining. Also, worried a bit since we have review cycles approaching. Planning to discuss this with my manager as well. Link to the pie chart [relevant to this question] : Edit: There is an item that is high priority, needs code to be written which I am planning to pick up this week, so should be sorted atleast wrt some contribution in terms of code. But, still would like to understand how important it is for tech leads and is it okay for Tech Leads to be able to code lesser than what I did as a Senior Software Engineer.

In my organization, there are SDE roles till level 4, and then on top of that, you become an EM. Many times, an SDE 3/4 (who is considered a technical lead) gives tasks or creates the sprint. But then when the junior engineer goes to an EM to show their work, the EM changes the entire approach or assigns vague tasks. This impacts the velocity of the sprint. I do want to understand: How do I put it out to the upper management such that this doesn't happen? Also, should an EM make technical decisions in this way?

I lead a team of five engineers. During sprint planning sessions, I collaborate with the team to create tasks aligned with our goals. Although the initial sprints were challenging, I now have a better grasp of the team's velocity. In the past, I frequently found myself directly involved in their tasks, providing boilerplates, due to their struggles with meeting the acceptance criteria. I am seeking strategies to maintain our pace without the need for constant updates or taking on the tasks myself, aiming to achieve our desired goals. Our team is newly formed, and we will soon be involving consultants, whom the organization views simply as resources. However, understanding their skill set and velocity poses a significant challenge.

I am an E4 Machine Learning Engineer working with a (traditional) Software Engineering Tech Lead who lacks a strong understanding of Machine Learning. This gap makes it challenging for him to communicate clearly the needed technical requirements, set a clear direction for my projects, and maintain consistent priorities, which often shift unexpectedly. As a result, I frequently feel unclear about my deliverables for this half-year and worry that this lack of clarity might negatively impact my performance review. Do you have any advice or suggestions on how I can navigate this situation?

I learned that my whole team is kind of new (Salesforce acquired this product), and they have just started contributing to the core platform. There are currently a lot of approvals necessary to merge front-end code into the system. This is rough as there's many epics connected to front-end work, and there is not a single senior person in the team which can take charge of looking into the high level architecture, following best practices, and doing better planning to release the code to prod. I am the only full-stack Staff engineer here, and this is why my EM wants me to create a master front-end tech spec for the team. As an example of something this doc can cover: At Salesforce, there are multiple ways to communicate with the back-end API, each of which has their pros and cons but that information is scattered - We can consolidate that info into this doc. Given that I haven't written any front-end code here at Salesforce, this task seems hard and I'm unsure how to do this without looking stupid.

i am thinking this is the path for software engineer: junior -> mid level -> senior -> staff -> principal. where does tech lead fit into this path? is tech lead an optional path on the way to rising up to principal? i would think tech lead needs to manage people and would be less hands on? thanks.

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?

I joined Cisco Meraki like a year ago as a Sr. SWE and got promoted to a Technical Leader. I kinda did the role of a Technical Leader as a Sr. SWE like mentoring junior engs, doing lots of code reviews, keeping up the code quality, contributing to org wide projects and such. I learnt all these things from working for Meta as a L5. Now that i got a new "Title", i have a feeling that i should do something more and different - I am not sure if i should feel that way because this is the first time i am at this level in my career. I am wondering what i should do to keep up with the expectations. When i had this convo with my Manager, got some tips but all around, it was the same things what i did before but i got repeateadly said that expectations for a Technical Leader is going to be much higher than a Sr. SWE. I saw a whole bunch of youtube videos and blog post reg Technical Leader role but i kinda know that already, I am sure a bunch of engs already been through this already. Any advice would be super helpful.