Why we don’t have Tech Leads at SwissBorg
An article to discover why we like to go against the grain with our team structures.
Why we don’t have Tech Leads
Written by Julien Deray
3 min read
Here at SwissBorg we believe that building a great engineering team comes from empowering the sub-teams and their members. By allowing and encouraging each and everyone to propose ideas, speak up when needed, and even run the show, we all get the chance to go the extra mile and create value every day, while allowing ourselves to grow as individuals.
We believe in trust, and communication of the vision and mission leading to the best way we know of scaling up efficiently:
With decentralised command and ownership.
Working in this way creates resilience by design and is the best way forward in continuing to thrive in this fast-paced market.
The points for having a Tech Lead
Of course it can be said that placing Tech Leads (or Team Leads, Architects) into the organisation chart of every team helps to smooth things out. They are able to lead by providing an understanding of the higher goal coupled with technical guidance and reference. Tech Leads would also add a certain sense of hierarchy, which can feel reassuring at times. Another point is that having a Team Lead creates an extra layer between Engineering Managers and Developers, making the Engineering Manager’s life slightly easier — at first — and providing the developers a go-to person.
The points for not having a Tech Lead
On the other hand, having this more vertical hierarchical structure of Developer, Tech Lead, and Engineering Manager would have some drawdowns. When lead by a technical manager, we have a tendency to seek their stamp of approval. This leads to less knowledge sharing and more crucially to a massive single point of failure.
At the moment, if an Engineering Manager is not on deck ( or ‘present’ ) to oversee technical decisions, the team can still move forward and be in the driver’s seat. If a team’s Tech Lead is not present, there can be a bottle neck effect where approval of work and actions is delayed and team members feel lost — usually stemming from caution that a wrong call will slow down progress later.
Another consideration is when Tech Leads grow their teams, egos can sometimes grow in parallel, deviating the team’s output and purpose to the goals of the Team Lead instead of the company as a whole. A final thought is that once these roles are introduced and established in the organisational chart they become set in stone and are very hard to change, as removing the position is seen as demotion.
Technical guidance at SwissBorg
Our Senior Engineers (and above) help to solve these possible Tech Lead issues. They are known to everyone and available to anyone, and contrary to being figures of authority, they use leadership and coaching to support the engineering team as a whole.
We believe that properly placing domain experts in these roles, across the engineering team, creates much more resilient sub-teams, who gain confidence by making their own decisions and moving forward.
These more autonomous sub-teams naturally drive the project’s technical aspects by enabling team members to come up with their own architecture designs and provide guidance. This helps the greater team to grow confidently and slowly become the senior engineers of tomorrow.
Having Tech Leads feels comfortable; having a one-stop shop for technical guidance and decision making is handy and can quicken the pace of competing tasks in the medium term. In the long term however, we feel this structure naturally encourages team members to place ownership on the shoulders of one person, instead of the team as a whole. We believe that domain experts spread across the company help in the creation of exceptionally resilient teams in the long run.
