Tech Lead Q&A and Videos

I'm more of an extrovert, while my tech lead is more of an introvert. I feel like our relationship isn't as open and honest as it should be, particularly around sharing feedback. They often times have major feedback for me, but it will come too late, either deep into project execution or as late as performance review. How can I make this relationship more fluid, so I can get feedback to improve earlier?

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?

As I pick up larger projects that require driving alignment across more and more teams, I’d like to understand any tips or advice on effectively driving alignment with those teams and being able to drive those outcomes faster. One recent example is that a partner team came back to us days before the launch of a feature pushing back on one of the core functionalities of the product. While they were consulted earlier in the project planning process and did not have pushback then, what is the best way to make a strong case to push forward while avoiding too much back and forth?

How can I enhance my soft skills, particularly in navigating leadership challenges? As someone from India for whom English is not the first language, I aim to transition into a senior or staff-level role. Building rapport with peers and juniors is essential for me, but I'm unsure how to foster personal relationships in the workplace. Are there any recommended books on this topic?

I've been talking with different founders about startups and exploring different getting started with Entrepreneurship And Tech Startups? I also watched several of the Taro videos on Entrepreneurship here. and it got me thinking about when the right time might be to start my own venture. Since I have high tolerance for risk, Could you provide some insights into what are strategies of finding co-founders? Moreover, what are your thoughts on working on side projects or trial work with potential co-founders before fully committing to a startup? How effective is this approach for building strong, collaborative teams and testing ideas? Additionally, I remember Alex and Rahul did explore incubators and accelerators as part of this process from one of the Taro Videos. These programs often facilitate co-founder matchmaking and provide a supportive environment. I also got accepted to On-Deck Program for their next cohort for 1 intensive week and thinking about applying to YC in the future with future co-founders. How beneficial are these resources for someone in the early stages of startup planning? How beneficial are these resources, and which ones would you recommend prioritizing in the early stages of startup planning?

I'm driving a project with ~5 engineers. Even though we're on track to make it now, the initial road was somewhat rocky. We had to go through a lot of conversations to get execution started, spending ~50% of the allotted time on planning and alignment. This led to scope being reduced for v1 and us building less features that we would have liked. As a startup, I know that we should be moving faster - What's the best way to handle the project from here and how can I improve in this area in the future?

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?

Background: I joined my current team as E5 and I've spent past few months delivering large projects. I've proven my technical ability to the team and got very positive feedback from my peers and my manager. However, since I'm currently the only mobile engineer in the team, I don't have enough capacity to handle all the upcoming projects and my manager decided to hire more mobile engineers. My manager told me that they want me to take on a more leading role and help with different projects. Before I join my current team, I was E4 at previous company and I only had 1:1 mentorship experience to help mentor other E3/E4 engineers (not at the same time). I got a few questions on my mind and any help would be appreciated. How to do better as a tech lead and mentor multiple engineers at the same time to help them grow? I'm delivering projects with good velocity and quality, but from my past experience I found it pretty hard to apply same standard to others, how should I change my mindset to help team move fast and improve quality instead of just being a good IC myself? I want to give new engineers (probably all E4s) chances to lead tech design. To what extent should I be helping with the designs? Should I delegate more and let them take full credit, or should I be handholding more? When I'm leading projects, how to make sure I get my part of credit while other mobile engineers also get their credits? Also related to this, how to better separate tasks on a project? I want to make sure they have chance to grow while I also get chance to grow.

My lead is working on a project that looks to be grabbing a lot of eye balls in the team. Especially by my manager and as it is important for the team. I have not been actively involved in this project and slowly my manager wants me to get involved. Now my lead who had done some initial design work architect reviews doesn't share much information on the work being done so far and goes to meetings around this project by himself. I don't want to sabotage his work and I understand that he wants his efforts to be recognized but the problem is if I am not involved in that conversation from the get-go I miss out on some key decisions taken on why we are doing some things. Also, such meetings also prepare us to understand other systems. Which I feel like I miss out on. when the eventual implementation comes to me I wouldn't be aware of some things. What should I do in this situation? Should I try to get more involved? I have already told my lead to shadow me in some of the meetings so I am aware of the context. But he doesn't involve me. The reason I ask is these meetings help us to understand the architecture POV and get to know the system better.

Context: I've recently received feedback from my manager that my execution on small-medium tasks was very good, but I do struggle scoping out tasks / projects that are more ambiguous. On my most recent work, this led to delays delivering work on time, and concretely defining when the work can be marked as complete. Question: How do you approach an ambiguous project, where requirements are not very well-defined ? Walk me through your thought process on how you would scope out the problem, align on with your teammates / TL, and land a design :)

I'm a L4 at Google, and am TLing a project with 6 other SWEs. I was working on one of the implementation docs, and had to work on a Postmortem incident and its AIs. I sharded off some parts of the implementation to one of the SWEs in the project. I'm back into the project now, and the other SWE is making great progress and I want to let them take it to completion for credits attribution. I'm confused on whether I should try to do most of the implementation for the designs I write myself or shard it off as other SWEs have a lot less on their plate in December, and early January. Could it be held against me in promo committees that I didn't handle a lot of implementation myself? My org has a high priority on lines of code written, which is causing this confusion.

How can an aspiring senior engineer, who excels at managing their own well-defined tasks, improve their skills in breaking down and delegating tasks effectively to junior team members? Additionally, what strategies can help in writing clear acceptance criteria when fleshing out tasks to ensure clarity and accessibility?

I have weekly meetings with leadership, and they consistently ask more about our timelines and engineering work, which I understand we need to provide. Having said that, what are some of the questions we engineers can ask leadership/product to hold them accountable for some of the requirements? What are some of the customer-centric questions we could ask?

I'm a senior software engineer in big tech and onboarded into my company and role as a team lead for the past 6 months. The project is almost complete, but work is not technically interesting and does not fit into my long term career goals. My manager is getting promoted as director to another org, and I wish to join him. He said he fought hard to bring me along with him, but my current director would not allow it due to product/engineering resourcing requirements. I expressed to my manager this was extremely disappointing news, and it's hard to see a future on this project/org. He said to talk to my director and we can follow up afterwards, because he didn't know just how much I wanted out. I can't leave the company due to the current job market, my short tenure and golden handcuffs. But I'm afraid if I keep chugging along, I'm just going to burn out. Any advice is much deeply appreciated.

I’m joining a late-stage startup in August. I talked to a bunch of people in the company but this upcoming chat will be my first with a tech lead. This startup’s levelling system is similar to Palantir’s - the only titles are SWE, tech lead and eng. manager. My goal in this conversation is to better understand the company’s promo culture, the expectations of each level and how to get to tech lead. What are some questions I should ask to get a better understanding? Are there any other topics that a tech lead is well-suited to answer that I haven't considered? If so, what are some questions I can ask?

We are a small team of engineers under a tech lead. This tech lead has other small teams under him in addition to ours. The techlead is extremely knowledgeable and is a 10x engineer pushing code everyday. The problem is he does not share his knowledge nor is he approachable. Whenever we try to ask him a question, we get a question back in return which is extremely domain specific and would require his level of expertise to answer in the first place. The morale in the team is low to the point where everyone just avoids asking him any questions until the very end. How does one approach and succeed in this situation?

Our company recently got acquihired by another company as we're a team specialized in GenAI in our logistics domain which is rare. Someone who is a manager in another team approached me with interest to use my expertise with GenAI effectively which could save them 2 hours per task (50K tasks in like last 10 years) I've talked with them 2 times now and they're interested in us collaborating , me or maybe also others. Our team wants to collaborate with others and add value. How do I bring this to my current team? Especially the Head of Tech who is like my manager, he often doesn't want me to operate on my own. And am concerned that by sharing this collaboration opportunity he'll say something like he takes over from here or something. The goal is to increase collaboration between teams and also would love to add value across teams, but not sure how that works with tasks on 1 team while also having tasks at another team. I was thinking about sharing in the standup that I've met team x and they are interested in collaborating on y there will be a follow up , I'll keep you informed. And telling product owner that I would like them to be there in the conversation. I feel like the moment I start going across teams I'm acting beyond my role, taking lead and stepping on others toes and not sure who to report to anymore. Thanks in advance!