Still want to become a team lead?

Should I become a team leader? I have been jumping between management and development for a long time now and still have not answered this question unequivocally. I have accumulated a lot of problems that do not allow me to relax. These problems are not related to any specific company. And this is not only my personal perception of reality, my colleagues have encountered the same thing. Therefore, further we will talk about the collective average team leader.

The purpose of this article is not to simply complain about this role. Rather, I want to highlight the most important issues that will become a red flag for someone when making an important decision in life.

Degradation

Management books or podcasts about team leadership always sound like a lot of smart words. It seems that team leadership is a bottomless area for personal development. But let's be honest, in practice, working as a team leader is more often some kind of mechanical routine. In fact, you just serve the team while everyone works and does complex tasks. What does a team leader do during this time:

• Monitors processes and rituals conducts similar team meetings

• Monitors the backlog moves tasks from one place to another

• Decomposes tasks creates many small tasks in the epic

• Follows the development of developers holds a 1:1 with the developers and finds out how they are doing

If there are no complex management challenges, you will rather immerse yourself in the routine of the same actions and the same type of meetings. You can read management books and develop in this direction, but practically no effect from this is visible in daily work. This happens because it is rarely possible to apply knowledge in practice, unlike engineering knowledge.

If you add to this the daily loss of technical skills, then you are becoming dumber every day rather than developing.

A lot of money is a myth

You can easily get into a situation where a developer from your team earns more than you. Perhaps there is nothing wrong with this and you can even find a logical justification for this phenomenon. There are key senior developers who need to be motivated and retained. And there is no such limitation that the development ceiling is the salary of his team leader.

But imagine this situation from the team leader's point of view. You put coding on the back burner, if not completely stopped programming. You don't program for a year or two. And at that time, a developer from your team starts getting paid more than you. A thought creeps in: did I really make the right choice? Perhaps, if I had developed as an engineer, I would have better conditions today.

In most cases, team leads do get paid a little more than developers, but not much. Team leads and seniors have roughly the same salary. In addition, a senior developer can complete their tasks in a few hours. At the same time, a team lead often spends half of their working time on meetings that cannot be optimized in terms of time. And then do the math yourself.

Severity of assessment

It is unclear how to evaluate your achievements. The team works and works, tasks are closed. Does this mean that you worked well as a team leader? It seems so, but I have never seen any admiration for this fact. Rather, it is perceived as a given. In some companies, they may even evaluate your technical achievements. That is, what you managed to code in your free time from meetings.

There is also a problem of self-esteem. Here you are writing about your achievements over the past six months, and it is not clear what to write. You held team meetings, went to some other meetings, moved tasks back and forth. And then you look at what your colleagues wrote about themselves – “I made a new service”, “Rewrote a module from X to Y”, “Dragged an important feature to sales”, etc. After that you think – what am I doing at all?

There are companies that tell you about expectations right away. There are also various team metrics that can be used to evaluate your work as a team leader. But this is rather rare. And you are very lucky if you got into such a company.

Hard job change

Developers don't really care about the context they are in. They can easily change jobs after several years in one company. It is enough for them to know a certain language, a working framework and some base, like algorithms, etc.

You usually become a team leader within a company without much knowledge about it. Often you are put in this role because you are the most responsible or for some other reason. As a result, you simply grow into the context of the company and work according to some internal rules and processes. And when the time comes to change jobs, problems begin.

In most cases, team leaders have a technical section at interviews, where you must first confirm your senior level. And this is a big problem, since you haven't coded for a long time and could have lost this skill. It turns out that you can't fully devote yourself to developing into management, because you simply won't be able to change jobs.

The second problem is the difficulty of passing the managerial section. You could be the best in your company, everything was clear in your team – tasks were done, goals were achieved. But you come to the interview and a test of knowledge of book management, abbreviations and solving abstract conflict situations from the interviewer's head begins. In other words, the team leader interview is just a randomizer, where there is a rather small chance of intersection with your experience.

Career dead end

In most cases, the team lead position is a career dead end. To understand this, it is enough to imagine the structure of the company. There is a product team, it has a team lead. If the company is large, then 4-5 teams can unite into a cluster. The cluster will also most likely have a conditional meta-team lead. This already turns out to be a pretty strong narrowing, where the chances of taking this position are minimal. Especially considering that the cluster leader is not particularly going to go anywhere.

You can imagine other variations of the structure, but the problem will be roughly the same everywhere. There are many team leads of the first line of contact with developers, and few senior management. Moreover, the turnover of senior management is quite low. So sit in your team for 5 years hoping that some opportunity will appear.

Summary

I've thrown in quite a lot of negativity. And that's not all, there are other problems. You might just have a hard time communicating with people so much. Or you might love coding so much that you'll suffer greatly without it.

There are advantages to being a team leader, but that's already being talked about everywhere. I wanted to highlight some very serious issues that might be a red flag for someone. In addition, most current team leaders try to turn a blind eye to these shortcomings, and sometimes even deceive themselves.

Now the decision is yours, do you still want to become a team leader?

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