One Year as a Tech Lead

A man cannot serve two masters

By now most people know the essay about a maker schedule and manager schedule. My co-worker who’s in much the same situation as I : what I intend to do in the morning in no way matches what actually gets done that day usually because something else interrupts me. I seem to remember a person mentioning on HackerNews that they didn’t accept Lead positions like the one I’m in for this very reason. When you’re not fully developing and you’re not fully managing it can be hard to do either well. I’ve actually found that picking different tasks is useful for this:

Infrastructure tasks

Requires significantly less “holding a program in your head”. You’re usually fooling with some configuration changes and monitoring those changes in some system. That means you can be interrupted and go back to them with ease.

Some bugs

Some bugs require deep thinking but, you can pick up the smaller ones.

Updates and upgrades

Take on making sure your dependencies are up to date. It’s a painful slow process but, it should be done and you can be distracted from it to help someone else without getting lost.