You Are Doomed to Fail as a Team Lead

I don’t know how I feel about technical leadership. Sitting at this position makes me realise that most processes run on experiments and are as trial and error as it gets. Being a team lead is one of the most confusing positions ever. Especially when everyone else feels like you’re at the next level where you can delegate when you feel like you’re learning new things everyday technically. At $currentJob, I am responsible for delegating work, describing tasks and making sure the work assigned to my team is done. This involves a lot of collaboration, and GLUE WORK. Oh my god, the fucking glue work. The unblocking. Being the go to guy. It makes me want to rip my hair out. Every ping on Teams, every ‘quick call?’ increases my stress levels. I miss blocking my calendar to just write code, and having the freedom to just do a lot of programming without having to deal with stakeholders and higher management. Does it just get like this as you move up the ladder? It’s like there’s a level of autonomy but not enough. It’s like semi middle management. Fancy problem comes up, my manager and I design a solution. I still have to knack to go implement the solution because I am way too hands on to not try it out. I too want to bury my head down and smash my keyboard till the design gets implemented. But what do I have to do now? Delegate it to someone else to implement it. There’s a catch though, you get blamed when things don’t go well or don’t get shipped. You now need to empower the next man to get it done and have the same excitement as you. But, no, you can’t, there’s glue work always waiting for you. Things never stop needing glue, it’s insane. All odds are stacked against you. It’s a different ball game. Dealing with humans is 1000x harder than knowing a cache belongs here instead of direct access. You can’t brute force the learnings and I guess it comes with time. Fortunately, I love this job enough to find out