My Understanding on the Role of Tech Lead
The reason I am writing this is sometimes(quite a lot of times) people are using the term: team leader to provide an ambiguous reference to the job scopes relevant to an engineering manager or a tech lead. But in the meanwhile, there are huge difference between the two….so when the manager is coming and asking he is looking forward you to be a team leader, feel free to use the job scope below to align with him 😂
1. Comparisons of JD
In simple words, tech lead focuses on the system and engineering manager focuses on people management.
| Tech Lead (System) | Engineering Manager (People) |
|---|---|
| Technical Excellence and Innovation | Career Planning, Promotions and Coaching |
| Architecture and System Integration | Headcount Planning and Hiring |
| Tech Mentoring, Adoption and Alignment | Team Planning and Delivery |
| Technical Spikes and Experiments | Objectives, Performance and Feedback |
| Code Reviews and Feedback | One on Ones |
| System Design Presentations | Participation in Technical Decisions |
| Technical Capacity Planning | Cascading Communications |
| Production Issues Escalation | Team Building Activities and Culture |
| System SLAs, Metrics & Monitoring | Team Protection and Happiness |
| Platform Direction, Patterns and Practices | Team Productivity and Metrics |
| Alignment with other Tech Leads | Alignment with other Dev Managers |
| Hands-On Coding 30% to 70% of the Time | Hands-On Coding 0% to 30% of the Time |
| System Roadmap (shared) | System Roadmap (shared) |
| Development Process (shared) | Development Process (shared) |
| Team Visibility and Recognition (shared) | Team Visibility and Recognition (shared) |
| Ability to Act as Engineering Manager when Required | Ability to Act as Tech Lead when Required |
2. Pros & Cons For The Two Positions
For Tech Lead:
- Pros:
- At the same level in the company, you are possibly earning more than your manager.
- Less meaningless meetings compare to the engineering manager. You can focus on technical stuffs like architecture and solutions.
- Cons:
- As the senior level increments, you are less likely to getting the same exposure like engineering manager. Because as the level increments, there will be a higher expectation on the people/project management job scopes.
- The exposure you get is totally depending on the project you are in, if the project sucks, there will be not too much technical value from your work.
For Engineering Manager:
- Pros:
- Higher chance of getting promoted, especially for senior level (staff engineering and onwards)
- Good for people who are good at communication, willing to go to manager track. It might be a pleasant thing to watch your team member’s growth under your help and the project moves smoothly.
- Cons:
- High dosage of communication, some times those meetings are stupid and you will feel that you are really wasting time, no matter it is for resolve project management issue or internal team conflicts
- Politics seems unavoidable in any places for a manager, and it results in more meaning less meetings 😂
3. Gut Feelings
Sometimes there is actually some intersections between the tech lead and engineering manager, like a tech lead can help to organize hiring/promotion/evaluation process, but overall, the boundaries between a tech lead and engineering manager should be quite clear. I am not saying that for a tech lead, the project management and communication skills are not important, but as a technical lead, you definitely don’t want to spend 90% of time in meeting, which in the long term does not add any credit for your own career development as a technical lead.
Having the capability of becoming an entry level engineering manager sometimes can be a natural outcome for senior level tech lead - you know the potential risk of the project because you understand the bottlenecks of the system and framework, you also understand the technical cost of a feature. But being a engineering manager for a long time which will makes you less competent as a tech lead, for you are loosing the familiarity of the recent technologies and have not time for hands on project practice.
To further understand what is the requirement for different levels of tech lead, feel free to read this article