Stop Writing Code If You Are a Team Leader
You have been coding your whole life. You like it; you are passionate about it and probably really good at it too. But then you start leading a team, which means that everything should change.
Or shouldn’t?
It’s an eternal question for every manager from an engineering background.
The hardest thing is to understand that you are not an actual developer anymore. You are now in a role with different responsibilities, different daily schedules, and tasks that involve different mental processes. Trying to mix business with pleasure, or in our case — trying to combine developing with management — is like working two jobs.
And working two jobs may often lead to early burning out and, frankly, not being any good in either of them.
Most development tasks require high concentration and focus, which contradicts the very nature of the team leader’s work. Constant meetings, calls, messages — a manager is always on alert. It’s tough to consider all the algorithm’s edge cases when your phone is ringing all the time.
And on the other side, it’s hard always to be prepared to answer your teammates’ or customers’ questions if all you can think about is the efficiency of that function you just wrote.
Being a good manager means giving up habits that make you inefficient, even if that means giving up coding.
Another thing is that spending a lot of time on development gives you little time to do your actual job as a manager. And your job is managing other people. Though you will probably make time for your primary duties — assigning tasks, making estimations, communicating with the customer — you will miss out on all the other “noncrucial” parts of your job. You can get so invested in a feature that you will miss some critical signs of your employees becoming demotivated to do their work, tired, or less happy.
You may not even notice that your team is no longer a team.
Every good leader needs to monitor their team members’ emotional state. And it’s hard to do that if you are too busy.
And, as you are busy, you become less creative. Who will come up with a new fun team-building activity? Most certainly not you, since you are too deep in the code.
But what if I do not want to give up coding?
It may so happen that plain management isn’t your path. Being a Team Lead is all about people; being a Tech Lead is about code. If programming is critical for you and brings you more joy, you may be more suited for a Technical Leader role. So choose wisely.
But as a Team Lead, you are still most welcome to join code reviews and help your teammates with challenging coding problems if you want to.
Consult. Guide. Assist.
That’s your motto now.
And of course, it’s always a good idea to keep reading technical articles, stay up to date with news and trends, solve little programming challenges for yourself to keep your brain sharp.
But no full-time development anymore. Promise?
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About the author
Lizzie is a Software Developer and a Team leader with overall 7 years of experience in the field. She has been managing development teams for 3 years now. In this blog, she writes about everything you would like to know about being a good leader, making your customer happy, and making your developers feel like a real team.
