As a former tech lead, if you are really mentoring and helping people, bet on allocating 20% of your time per person. Of course this leaves you with a LOT less

As a former tech lead, if you are really mentoring and helping people, bet on allocating 20% of your time per person. Of course this leaves you with a LOT less time to do your own job, but with luck, your team's goal should be to do a better job than you yourself could have done. Which was always my target. The team did it, and did it better than I could have expected. This 20% ties in great with many modest management types who are out of their comfort zone above about 3 people. There a quote somewhere in Programmers at Work that the best team is one that will still fit in a VW Bug.