Unobvious disadvantages of the team lead position
I’ve come across quite a lot of material on how to become a team lead developer, why to do it, etc., while when talking about the disadvantages, they mainly mention increasing the number of calls/communications with people. I will try to describe those moments that are usually not talked about.
For the last 6 years I have been working as a backend team lead. This is mainly design development, but I also had to work with products.
Jobs and money
I’ll start with the main difficulty, which is on the surface: there are fewer vacancies. And much less. If as a senior you can get 5-6 offers in a couple of weeks, then 1-2 per lead is already a good result. This is due to the following points:
There are simply fewer vacancies. There is no escape from this. On the plus side, there are fewer people willing to fill such positions.
Increasing the number of stages. You will first be interviewed as a developer, and then an additional 1-2 stages on management and software.
Need more chemistry. A very unclear condition. It is necessary to coincide with the approach to development with senior management. And to be honest, I couldn’t figure out how to prepare for this. Lucky or unlucky.
Each company has its own understanding of who a team lead is. Somewhere this is a strong developer who assigns tasks in Jira. And for about a year you don’t write a single line of code, but you work on the budget and roadmap of the project/product more than the RP.
There are companies where developers are comfortable working remotely, but more often they want to see them in the office.
A separate issue is remote currency. Finding a job in Europe/USA as a developer, of course, is not easy, but it is quite possible, while there are only a few lead vacancies. Most often it is taken from local ones. Very different requirements for the level of English: if a developer only needs to say a couple of phrases, then the requirements for a lead position are much higher. And since most companies in the Russian Federation cannot compete in salary terms, it turns out that it is more profitable to work as a senior. Moreover, the situation is quite possible in the domestic market. I have already seen vacancies for a lead with a salary of only 280–300 thousand rubles.
In general, if we talk about the motivational part, the salary does not increase much and does not at all correlate with the increased volume of work.
This problem is highly correlated with the next one. If you start developing less, the skill is lost. There is no escape from this. It becomes increasingly difficult to return to the previous position. You have to spend a lot of time studying not only new materials, but new directions for yourself. Which, on the one hand, of course, gives growth, but the income largely came from other skills.
Now it’s not your problem
As a developer, you are typically responsible for your own block of work. The team leader is responsible for everything. You must understand every part of the product (fortunately, not as deeply as the developer) and know who to assign the task to solve, and help solve this problem if the employee cannot cope. No development resource – that’s your problem. Bad analytics – your task is to give all the data to the development. And you yourself I liked the quote, unfortunately, I don’t remember its author: “Love your problems, if there were no problems, you wouldn’t be needed.”
All problems are yours, all achievements are yours
Classics of management and delegation of tasks. The leader is responsible for problems, but must also emphasize that successes are achieved through the joint efforts of the entire team (c). That is, Vasya fixed the bug, but the team missed the deadline because of you. This greatly affects both the impostor syndrome and leads to burnout in principle. You can only come to terms with this and move on with your life.
One among strangers, a stranger among one’s own
You are not a manager yet, much less C-level. But you are no longer a developer. The team already has a chat without a leader (that is, without you), and they love to communicate there. Breaking this barrier is very difficult, and it is not always clear whether it is worth it. And if you can influence KPIs, and therefore salaries and bonuses, you will never belong, and it will be felt.
You have no power here
In most cases, a strange situation results. It seems like a leader, but it seems like there are no real tools. You can’t make a decision about dismissal (plus there is also the Labor Code of the Russian Federation), somewhere you don’t choose who to recruit. Whoever they give you, you work with. You influence the salary budget or salary indexation only indirectly. Most often it is impossible to abandon a project. In the best case, it turns out to change the timing and amount of required resources.
In custody
With all this, the position of a team lead is quite interesting from the point of view of work, from the point of view of tasks, etc. And this is the most direct, closest path to the position of a service station, allowing you to take on a lot of new and interesting responsibilities. And my key task now is not to dissuade you, but to help you make a balanced approach to your choice, taking into account possible disadvantages, which are rarely talked about.
