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Why Most Programmers End Up Being (or Are) Underperforming Technical Leads
And how not to be one
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 to succeed, and strategize for success. He expected everyone else on his team to be as good as he was as a programmer so he didn’t spend the time necessary to invest in their development — mostly because he couldn’t relate to their needs.
As the months went on, he proved to be less than capable of performing well in his new position. He had reached a brand new level of incompetence. His better nature and lack of managerial skills through his previous job led him to fail at what he did. This incompetence led his team’s productivity to plummet and their organization to crumble.
The Peter Principle
Bob’s situation is a all-too-familiar reality that many of us may recognize. I don’t know about you, but I’ve known a multitude of senior developers and technical leads who are absolute terrible at doing what their job requires— leading.
