Member-only story

Why Most Programmers End Up Being (or Are) Underperforming Technical Leads

And how not to be one

Zachary Minott
Better Programming
5 min readFeb 23, 2021

--

Photo by Bahador on Unsplash

Meet Bob

Bob is an extremely ambitious and overachieving developer.

He works hard, refines his coding skills on a daily basis, and always finishes a project on or ahead of time — eager to get started on his next project. You can look at his code and immediately intuit that he’s a master at designing and architecting beautifully written code. He loves everything his job has to offer and because of that, he shows up every single day with an energy that allows him to pound out value like a machine. He feels on top of the world.

Bob is the quintessential programmer that many of us yearn to become. Surely, no one is more deserving of promotion than him? So, Bob was promoted to technical lead, a position that management thought that he’d be even more valuable in. Rightfully so. But this also meant that he’d write less code and instead would have to focus more on managing the direction of the project as a whole.

In other words, he’d have to do less of what he loved as a trade-off to do more of what he didn’t know how to do — managing others.

He lacked the ability to direct others, empathize with their schedules and knowledge, break tasks down for other people…

--

--

Zachary Minott
Zachary Minott

Written by Zachary Minott

Salesforce Architect | Olympic Weightlifter | Pseudo-Philosopher | Email: zacharyminott1997@gmail.com

Responses (31)

What are your thoughts?