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The Effective Tech Lead Is a 100x Engineer

205 points by kevinSuttle 9y ago

mykull 9y ago
I really don't think coining the term 10x did anything to help developers or the state of development, and likewise here.
- tech_tuna 9y ago
  Agreed, any real 10x engineer would scoff at the term. I've known maybe a handful of people I'd consider 10x in my career.
  - brainbrane 9y ago
    > I've known maybe a handful of people I'd consider 10x in my career. I've only known one. And having that type of engineer isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be. The other members of the team would discuss a problem, hash out a couple of potential solutions, and then begin assessing how long it will take and who will do which parts. Two days later the 10x engineer would drop an amazing implementation of the solution into our laps. The result is that everyone else on the team got demoralized and stressed about whether they were going to have meaningful work to point to in their performance assessments. The entire team ended up blowing apart.
- lawlessone 9y ago
  Companies will probably start assigning us all badges soon like in game achievements/levels. 100x 200x gives me an idea for terrible clicker game.
  - fitpolar 9y ago
    That day is when I’m checking out for ever and retiring. I would prefer to sell coffee over boarding the bs train.
- dlevine 9y ago
  Agreed. I think that the advantage of a good tech lead is that they: 1) Make sure that the people working for them are happy and challenged and 2) Remove any roadblocks required for developers to solve the problems that they are working on (I would say "write code", but I don't think that the ultimate measure of developer productivity is how much code they write). I think that good tech leads should help to keep productivity growing mostly (almost?) linearly as the engineering team grows.
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    What you are describing also fits the description of a good manager. There is more to management than continuously asking "When is it done?" and the lines between tech lead and manager are very blurry.
  - fitpolar 9y ago
    Isn’t that the role of the scrum master? I fail to see the value that another layer of management provides vs a good scrum master... and if the scrum master isn’t any good, train them to be. I thought it was a well written article though, and the author’s company sounds like the best environment to be in with a tech lead.
- alex- 9y ago
  I also agree that it is not a helpful term. I like to think we are all 10x developers. The question of a 1x developer should be how to grow their productivity (assuming they are motivated to do so). Less productive developers should not feel like they have one tenth of the natural talent someone else has. Instead they should look at how they can improve their work flow/knowledge and companies should try and maximise the output of their employees. Yes some people will always be better/more productive than others, but most people are differentiated by completely controllable factors.
  - commandlinefan 9y ago
    > I like to think we are all 10x developers Well, that's why the author had to call tech leads "100x developers". x inflation has led us to this situation where 10x is now a baseline minimum. Anything under 100x is just mediocre.
  - typon 9y ago
    > I like to think we are all 10x developers Who's "we"?
- kolpa 9y ago
  Great organizations have "10x" teams, not "10x" people. A good organization produces results that are the product of their parts, not the sum (or worse)
- hinkley 9y ago
  I’ve known developers who couldn’t do certain hard tasks no matter how long you gave them. That fact notwithstanding, I’ve never met someone more than 4x faster than anyone I would consider adequate. Maybe that says I have demanding standards (likely). Maybe that means I’ve never been in the presence of great developers (less likely). What I have met is people who value their own productivity over that of the team. They create code that slows all but themselves down. The more clever the person the worse the damage. I have no doubt that such a one could force a situation with a ten to one ratio, especially with developers without the self esteem to push back.
yc-kraln 9y ago
You know what happens at 100x? You burn out 100x faster. But you aren't paid 100x more.
- icefox 9y ago
  Yup, and they are willing to bet you will take a 3% yearly raise rather than look for another job.
- bargl 9y ago
  From the article. > How can I avoid burning my team out? If a team can't meet a deadline, it's a management problem, and not the team's problem. This means that, somewhere along the way, the project didn't go as planned and a course wasn't corrected. So, Rule Number 1 to avoid burnout is "Manage the project and expectations well" (See: Help! We are behind schedule!). Rule number 2: Never ask more of your team than you would ask of yourself (and you mustn't ask yourself to work nights and weekends). Other organizations might ask their teams to pull longer hours when the going gets rough. This is a laser-focused bullet train to attrition and long-term inefficiencies. Webflow cares deeply about its team, not only professionally, but personally, so we must do our best to manage our time well.
- codegladiator 9y ago
  Wouldn't people who are becoming ctos would already have enough experience to know that ?
badloginagain 9y ago
Only comments here discussing the shittiness of '100x' engineer, despite the first paragraph of the article specifically stating that a good Lead is a force multiplier of a team. Read the article.
- mattlondon 9y ago
  I think people are upset with the NNNx stuff people use. My instant reaction to seeing this headline was one of mild disgust - I cant bring myself to read the article. I dont have data, but I think the whole 10x circle-jerk is harmful to our profession - non-technical people (e.g. managers, HR etc) think it is "a thing", which means we end up working with "10x" jerks and/or are getting pressured into working overtime/weekends etc so that we can live up to this unrealistic "10x" benchmark/expectations.
- colmvp 9y ago
  To be fair, the article starts off with "Hyperbolic click-bait title aside," which goes to show the author knows exactly what he's doing there.
- bargl 9y ago
  Agreed title and even intro paragraph do this article no justice.
- braythwayt 9y ago
  > There are two kinds of blog post titles > > Those that everybody complains about, and those that > nobody has read, because they attracted no attention. Massive oversimplification, but still... In a world where clicks are driven by upvotes and retweets and shares and so forth... Gaining early attention is vital.
bargl 9y ago
This was a fantastic read that isn't done any service by the CRAPPY title of the article. I can say that they aren't trying to get 10x the work on 1x the budget, but how to effectively manage a team so that your employees feel motivated to work hard for you when they are at work, but aren't stressed by external factors. The basic premise is how do you as a manager give your team 10x time to actually work, focus on work, and enjoy life. Please don't be deterred by the terrible title. Or even not so fantastic intro.
- leonardsouza 9y ago
  Hey @bargl- I'm the author of that article and I couldn't agree with your summary more. "The basic premise is how do you as a manager give your team 10x time to actually work, focus on work, and enjoy life." Thanks for sharing that! (Also, apologies for the click-baity, terrible title, lol. I tried to make light of it in the article.)
  - bargl 9y ago
    I loved the article. I fell into a project management / tech lead role and while I love it I have failed at a LOT of things while working through it. I didn't have a mentor to what an effective Tech Lead which I feel like this article serves as. IMO the intro to the article makes up for the title and the content of it is amazing. For example, I've pushed back on management about deadlines because developers hate them and it causes stress / stagnation. BUT the business needs them and I love how you talk to that in a way that I can effectively manage both up and down. Thank you very much for this. If I'd read it 4 months earlier I'd have missed some major (self inflicted) pain points.
  - kolpa 9y ago
    If you are proud of your article, why give it a trash title?
mav3r1ck 9y ago
Having been on a project with a 100x tech lead who rarely wrote code (but every time it was amazing) due to their leadership position, followed (and preceded now that I think about it) by a project where the tech lead was a 10x engineer who wrote tons of solid, bug-free code ,but was not really a great tech lead, this is 100% true. The difference between the projects were night and day. The defining feature of the 100x tech lead for me was their ability to do code reviews-- with a tilt of the head, they would point out something that no one else thought of and helped make the code better. I really wish I had the ability to review code that way that 100xer did.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  Yeah. Reading code is definitely an underrated skill. I always think that Linus Torvals' secret is his ability to read code quickly and comprehend it on a deep level. I am pretty good at reviewing single blocks of code but if you dump a complex system on me I struggle to comprehend it in depth within reasonable time.
- fyfy18 9y ago
  I also had the opportunity of working with a 100x tech lead. Their coding skills weren’t that great (although they did very little, so it may have just been what I saw was rushed out), but they had a very good understanding of how all the parts fit together and what was important for the business, which I would say is more important. They were able to bridge the gap between the business and the tech team, and able to manage expectations on both sides without any issues.
tboyd47 9y ago
> The Tech Lead is a “hybrid” role with one foot in management and the other in engineering I may have a limited experience but I've never seen an effective Tech Lead who was a hybrid like this and I have serious doubts it's even possible. The amount of time these tech leads spend coding necessarily expands and consumes the time they have available for management. The type of "management" they do then becomes more defensive/territorial than directing/guiding. In the end they end up more of a dev with super powers who has a veto over every other developer's technical decisions, but is still primarily concerned with completing their own contributions rather than the project and team health as a whole. In the best case, they do split work, delegate, mentor, and lead meetings, but always end up doing the business critical or challenging pieces themselves (because why would I take the time to explain this when I could just do it...), and in the worst case, they don't delegate at all and actually communicate even less than they did as an individual contributor.
- Bahamut 9y ago
  I have been in this role at my previous job - I had the responsibilities of an engineering manager and a team/tech lead. I focused on my team's productivity/management responsibilities first, and coding/my own technical productivity second. Even doing that, I was able to do so much coding that after I left, I heard that someone said that the company would have to hire 3 senior devs to replace just my coding. I was generally very hands off and tried to foster autonomy in my team as well, deferring to my team's judgment/expertise. The people do exist, but I think it's a terrible idea to expect most engineers to be able to jump into a dual technical lead and manager role, as I don't think most engineers have the skills to pull off both.
  - vvanders 9y ago
    Yup, great call out. As a Tech Lead your team productivity takes precedence, even if that means you don't spend any time coding during a sprint. That's why it's a different track than a IC or subject matter expert.
- busterarm 9y ago
  This is exactly my experience and an environment I avoid working in if at all possible.
dfsegoat 9y ago
"Force multiplier" -- love that you borrowed this term from military doctrine, because that is exactly what a good tech lead is IMO. Per the Wiki definition [0]: "Force multiplication or a force multiplier refers to a factor or a combination of factors that dramatically increases (hence "multiplies") the effectiveness of an item or group, giving a given number of troops (or other personnel) or weapons (or other hardware) the ability to accomplish greater things than without it." [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_multiplication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_multiplication
- lfowles 9y ago
  Interesting, I didn't realize the term was so strongly associated with military doctrine. Just assumed it was a glorified way of referring to simple machines such as levers.
morley 9y ago
I'm a little surprised that in the article, the tech lead is in charge of breaking up a task into parts. That seems like something a capable SEII should be able to handle, and it only improves them to be able to develop that skill. (Though maybe that means I was a lot less effective as a tech lead than I thought.)
- tzhenghao 9y ago
  I don't think you're wrong here. Relatively experienced SWEs should be able to do this by themselves. Tech leads should be delegating some of this responsibility to the individual contributors and only offering minor pushback to keep general clean architecture and higher level tech infrastructure goals in check.
dpweb 9y ago
Stress is more a function of the culture of the company you are working for and can be influenced by your manager and direct coworkers but not by much. Culture is like the weather and is created by the very top level executives. As far as the legend of the 10x or 100x developer, technically it does exist in the sense that the smart lead will not even entertain time wasting efforts, so to calculate the value of that you could say is infinite x. I’m skeptical however that you can transfer your extraordinary abilities to your team members. The most brilliant productive people I cant imagine they can truly transfer that to others. Their ability comes off more like a God given gift, so to speak. Surely they add value individually and add value to each team member by their guidance and mentorship. The 10x concept though somewhat confuses the truly important question, both to the technical programmer employee and their capitalist business bosses. How much value is really being added and at what cost.
deleted 9y ago
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juandazapata 9y ago
Click bait. Even the author recognizes it in the very first paragraph.
aylmao 9y ago
I know it's hyperbole and I'm being nit-picky but come on, 100x? 10x already sounds a bit like exaggeration, but implying there's an engineer out there who can do the same amount of work in 3-4 days as a normal engineer in a year is too much lol.
- afinlayson 9y ago
  Depends on how many direct reports the person can scale to. But I agree 100x is a little high. If you have a 10 person team and they all can do 2x what an unled team, The math might work out to be a 10x team lead. But there I go trying to use Math to justify hyperbole...
- trendia 9y ago
  I can think of an example, though even this is somewhat of astretch: Suppose person A takes 40 hours to write C code to manipulate a large data set. Person B puts the data in a database and is able to write commands, which only take 10 minutes, to achieve roughly the same thing.
  - aylmao 9y ago
    Oh, I can see this, ok. I've spent an hour or so googling and debugging something before asking someone who knows the answer and does it in like 30 seconds hahah. Person A should've considered alternatives and asked around before spending a week on that manipulation lol.
- esturk 9y ago
  100x'ers do exist. But by Lokta's Law, they occur about 1 in 10000. Usually, a 10x'er is only 1/100 so they are much easier to find. You probably know them as Fellow/Staff Engineers.
ianstallings 9y ago
Good content in your guide to your new tech leads, laying out expectations right up front and giving them guidance. Most companies don't have anything like that, in my experience.
argimenes 9y ago
Why not a 1,000,000,000x engineer? There, I win.
pro_zac 9y ago
I've found the key to being an effective tech lead is to look at the team as an extension of yourself. As a senior engineer there is only so much you can do. Given the right team, you can do much more. This requires you do the planning and specifications, and occasionally pick off the difficult task. However, you must balance your engineering time against the productivity of the team. My number one goal as a lead is always for my team to come in and work without interruption. Everything they need to complete a task should be in the task management software. This is what I want as a dev, and so is what I aim to provide for my devs. This doesn't mean writing all the specs myself. Give the devs enough info to write their own tasks and review them before they start. This is manageable up to about 6 people. If you have a bigger team, then you need sub-leads to spread the load.
- Tomminn 9y ago
  Or, to be glib, you now program programmers, and so code in the highest level programming language of all.
imh 9y ago
1) Can mods change the title to something not-clickbait, maybe even related to the content of the article? The author acknowledges it's trash and does it anyways, but we don't have to. Perhaps "The Webflow Tech Lead Guide" 2) Does anyone know of any data to support the 10x/100x idea? I hear it thrown around so much, but it's always struck me as an echo chamber kind of self affirmation to support questionable hiring practices and cop-outs.
afinlayson 9y ago
Yes, but the wrong one can be 100x the failure. This goes for all leadership positions.
bm1362 9y ago
I've been a tech lead in the past and am currently a tech lead for a 1-man project. I agree with the sentiments here: if you're contributing a significant amount of code then you're probably failing the rest of the team in some way. It's hard to be on top of everyone else's work, the architecture, the weekly planning and the external team syncs while also trying to write features. Being alone, I'm basically taking shortcuts to get results until I have more bandwidth or get a team member to help shore things up. The goals and deadlines were set way above my head so unfortunately outcomes are prioritized as it stands.
megamindbrian2 9y ago
The only "work that matters" is growing food and service people. The rest of this up and coming technology bubble is hubris.
- trendia 9y ago
  I understand how you grow food, but how do you grow service people?
- joejerryronnie 9y ago
  Yes, but we also need soldiers to keep other soldiers from taking the food. And stone keeps and villages with market places to trade food for goods. And better farming techniques to increase our food production. Also, some more advanced machines to allow better food processing and some textiles. We probably need something a little more efficient than water or steam power. And logistics! Definitely need a way to get people and goods from one place to another. At some point, we'll need to organize all this activity better and start to specialize. Maybe there's a better way to track all this stuff than manual ledgers. Wait, we can leverage electricity and simple lever machines (up/down or 0/1 if you will) for tracking this stuff. Perhaps if we connected all these machines together into some kind of a network . . .
  - megamindbrian2 9y ago
    If every neighborhood had a lot designed to produce food for every person +1 we wouldn't need so much logistics and lever machines.
bluesnowmonkey 9y ago
How am I supposed to write a spec so detailed that Junior engineers can build it? To be a tech lead you have to do waterfall development?
acconrad 9y ago
I really don't understand what the difference is between tech lead and engineering manager after reading this article. I did exactly these things and also people management as an EM but I spent 75% coding/code review and 25% in meetings/one-on-ones. 30% seems awfully low for a tech lead; is this just like a new term that's been recently birthed in job descriptions? It seems like it's for companies that are too small to have principal software engineers/architects and also too small to have a management track, but they have EMs at Webflow so I'm really curious what the author does in his day-to-day.
Madmallard 9y ago
I think with these multipliers itd be better just understanding the IQs of the people involved. Two of the most influential Tech Leads of our time had ~160 IQs by estimates: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

205 points by kevinSuttle 9y ago

I really don't think coining the term 10x did anything to help developers or the state of development, and likewise here.

tech_tuna 9y ago
Agreed, any real 10x engineer would scoff at the term. I've known maybe a handful of people I'd consider 10x in my career.
- brainbrane 9y ago
  > I've known maybe a handful of people I'd consider 10x in my career. I've only known one. And having that type of engineer isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be. The other members of the team would discuss a problem, hash out a couple of potential solutions, and then begin assessing how long it will take and who will do which parts. Two days later the 10x engineer would drop an amazing implementation of the solution into our laps. The result is that everyone else on the team got demoralized and stressed about whether they were going to have meaningful work to point to in their performance assessments. The entire team ended up blowing apart.
lawlessone 9y ago
Companies will probably start assigning us all badges soon like in game achievements/levels. 100x 200x gives me an idea for terrible clicker game.
- fitpolar 9y ago
  That day is when I’m checking out for ever and retiring. I would prefer to sell coffee over boarding the bs train.
dlevine 9y ago
Agreed. I think that the advantage of a good tech lead is that they: 1) Make sure that the people working for them are happy and challenged and 2) Remove any roadblocks required for developers to solve the problems that they are working on (I would say "write code", but I don't think that the ultimate measure of developer productivity is how much code they write). I think that good tech leads should help to keep productivity growing mostly (almost?) linearly as the engineering team grows.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  What you are describing also fits the description of a good manager. There is more to management than continuously asking "When is it done?" and the lines between tech lead and manager are very blurry.
- fitpolar 9y ago
  Isn’t that the role of the scrum master? I fail to see the value that another layer of management provides vs a good scrum master... and if the scrum master isn’t any good, train them to be. I thought it was a well written article though, and the author’s company sounds like the best environment to be in with a tech lead.
alex- 9y ago
I also agree that it is not a helpful term. I like to think we are all 10x developers. The question of a 1x developer should be how to grow their productivity (assuming they are motivated to do so). Less productive developers should not feel like they have one tenth of the natural talent someone else has. Instead they should look at how they can improve their work flow/knowledge and companies should try and maximise the output of their employees. Yes some people will always be better/more productive than others, but most people are differentiated by completely controllable factors.
- commandlinefan 9y ago
  > I like to think we are all 10x developers Well, that's why the author had to call tech leads "100x developers". x inflation has led us to this situation where 10x is now a baseline minimum. Anything under 100x is just mediocre.
- typon 9y ago
  > I like to think we are all 10x developers Who's "we"?
kolpa 9y ago
Great organizations have "10x" teams, not "10x" people. A good organization produces results that are the product of their parts, not the sum (or worse)
hinkley 9y ago
I’ve known developers who couldn’t do certain hard tasks no matter how long you gave them. That fact notwithstanding, I’ve never met someone more than 4x faster than anyone I would consider adequate. Maybe that says I have demanding standards (likely). Maybe that means I’ve never been in the presence of great developers (less likely). What I have met is people who value their own productivity over that of the team. They create code that slows all but themselves down. The more clever the person the worse the damage. I have no doubt that such a one could force a situation with a ten to one ratio, especially with developers without the self esteem to push back.

yc-kraln 9y ago

You know what happens at 100x? You burn out 100x faster. But you aren't paid 100x more.

icefox 9y ago
Yup, and they are willing to bet you will take a 3% yearly raise rather than look for another job.
bargl 9y ago
From the article. > How can I avoid burning my team out? If a team can't meet a deadline, it's a management problem, and not the team's problem. This means that, somewhere along the way, the project didn't go as planned and a course wasn't corrected. So, Rule Number 1 to avoid burnout is "Manage the project and expectations well" (See: Help! We are behind schedule!). Rule number 2: Never ask more of your team than you would ask of yourself (and you mustn't ask yourself to work nights and weekends). Other organizations might ask their teams to pull longer hours when the going gets rough. This is a laser-focused bullet train to attrition and long-term inefficiencies. Webflow cares deeply about its team, not only professionally, but personally, so we must do our best to manage our time well.
codegladiator 9y ago
Wouldn't people who are becoming ctos would already have enough experience to know that ?

badloginagain 9y ago

Only comments here discussing the shittiness of '100x' engineer, despite the first paragraph of the article specifically stating that a good Lead is a force multiplier of a team. Read the article.

mattlondon 9y ago
I think people are upset with the NNNx stuff people use. My instant reaction to seeing this headline was one of mild disgust - I cant bring myself to read the article. I dont have data, but I think the whole 10x circle-jerk is harmful to our profession - non-technical people (e.g. managers, HR etc) think it is "a thing", which means we end up working with "10x" jerks and/or are getting pressured into working overtime/weekends etc so that we can live up to this unrealistic "10x" benchmark/expectations.
colmvp 9y ago
To be fair, the article starts off with "Hyperbolic click-bait title aside," which goes to show the author knows exactly what he's doing there.
bargl 9y ago
Agreed title and even intro paragraph do this article no justice.
braythwayt 9y ago
> There are two kinds of blog post titles > > Those that everybody complains about, and those that > nobody has read, because they attracted no attention. Massive oversimplification, but still... In a world where clicks are driven by upvotes and retweets and shares and so forth... Gaining early attention is vital.

bargl 9y ago

This was a fantastic read that isn't done any service by the CRAPPY title of the article. I can say that they aren't trying to get 10x the work on 1x the budget, but how to effectively manage a team so that your employees feel motivated to work hard for you when they are at work, but aren't stressed by external factors. The basic premise is how do you as a manager give your team 10x time to actually work, focus on work, and enjoy life. Please don't be deterred by the terrible title. Or even not so fantastic intro.

leonardsouza 9y ago
Hey @bargl- I'm the author of that article and I couldn't agree with your summary more. "The basic premise is how do you as a manager give your team 10x time to actually work, focus on work, and enjoy life." Thanks for sharing that! (Also, apologies for the click-baity, terrible title, lol. I tried to make light of it in the article.)
- bargl 9y ago
  I loved the article. I fell into a project management / tech lead role and while I love it I have failed at a LOT of things while working through it. I didn't have a mentor to what an effective Tech Lead which I feel like this article serves as. IMO the intro to the article makes up for the title and the content of it is amazing. For example, I've pushed back on management about deadlines because developers hate them and it causes stress / stagnation. BUT the business needs them and I love how you talk to that in a way that I can effectively manage both up and down. Thank you very much for this. If I'd read it 4 months earlier I'd have missed some major (self inflicted) pain points.
- kolpa 9y ago
  If you are proud of your article, why give it a trash title?

mav3r1ck 9y ago

Having been on a project with a 100x tech lead who rarely wrote code (but every time it was amazing) due to their leadership position, followed (and preceded now that I think about it) by a project where the tech lead was a 10x engineer who wrote tons of solid, bug-free code ,but was not really a great tech lead, this is 100% true. The difference between the projects were night and day. The defining feature of the 100x tech lead for me was their ability to do code reviews-- with a tilt of the head, they would point out something that no one else thought of and helped make the code better. I really wish I had the ability to review code that way that 100xer did.

maxxxxx 9y ago
Yeah. Reading code is definitely an underrated skill. I always think that Linus Torvals' secret is his ability to read code quickly and comprehend it on a deep level. I am pretty good at reviewing single blocks of code but if you dump a complex system on me I struggle to comprehend it in depth within reasonable time.
fyfy18 9y ago
I also had the opportunity of working with a 100x tech lead. Their coding skills weren’t that great (although they did very little, so it may have just been what I saw was rushed out), but they had a very good understanding of how all the parts fit together and what was important for the business, which I would say is more important. They were able to bridge the gap between the business and the tech team, and able to manage expectations on both sides without any issues.

tboyd47 9y ago

> The Tech Lead is a “hybrid” role with one foot in management and the other in engineering I may have a limited experience but I've never seen an effective Tech Lead who was a hybrid like this and I have serious doubts it's even possible. The amount of time these tech leads spend coding necessarily expands and consumes the time they have available for management. The type of "management" they do then becomes more defensive/territorial than directing/guiding. In the end they end up more of a dev with super powers who has a veto over every other developer's technical decisions, but is still primarily concerned with completing their own contributions rather than the project and team health as a whole. In the best case, they do split work, delegate, mentor, and lead meetings, but always end up doing the business critical or challenging pieces themselves (because why would I take the time to explain this when I could just do it...), and in the worst case, they don't delegate at all and actually communicate even less than they did as an individual contributor.

Bahamut 9y ago
I have been in this role at my previous job - I had the responsibilities of an engineering manager and a team/tech lead. I focused on my team's productivity/management responsibilities first, and coding/my own technical productivity second. Even doing that, I was able to do so much coding that after I left, I heard that someone said that the company would have to hire 3 senior devs to replace just my coding. I was generally very hands off and tried to foster autonomy in my team as well, deferring to my team's judgment/expertise. The people do exist, but I think it's a terrible idea to expect most engineers to be able to jump into a dual technical lead and manager role, as I don't think most engineers have the skills to pull off both.
- vvanders 9y ago
  Yup, great call out. As a Tech Lead your team productivity takes precedence, even if that means you don't spend any time coding during a sprint. That's why it's a different track than a IC or subject matter expert.
busterarm 9y ago
This is exactly my experience and an environment I avoid working in if at all possible.

dfsegoat 9y ago

"Force multiplier" -- love that you borrowed this term from military doctrine, because that is exactly what a good tech lead is IMO. Per the Wiki definition [0]: "Force multiplication or a force multiplier refers to a factor or a combination of factors that dramatically increases (hence "multiplies") the effectiveness of an item or group, giving a given number of troops (or other personnel) or weapons (or other hardware) the ability to accomplish greater things than without it." [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_multiplication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_multiplication

lfowles 9y ago
Interesting, I didn't realize the term was so strongly associated with military doctrine. Just assumed it was a glorified way of referring to simple machines such as levers.

morley 9y ago

I'm a little surprised that in the article, the tech lead is in charge of breaking up a task into parts. That seems like something a capable SEII should be able to handle, and it only improves them to be able to develop that skill. (Though maybe that means I was a lot less effective as a tech lead than I thought.)

tzhenghao 9y ago
I don't think you're wrong here. Relatively experienced SWEs should be able to do this by themselves. Tech leads should be delegating some of this responsibility to the individual contributors and only offering minor pushback to keep general clean architecture and higher level tech infrastructure goals in check.

dpweb 9y ago

Stress is more a function of the culture of the company you are working for and can be influenced by your manager and direct coworkers but not by much. Culture is like the weather and is created by the very top level executives. As far as the legend of the 10x or 100x developer, technically it does exist in the sense that the smart lead will not even entertain time wasting efforts, so to calculate the value of that you could say is infinite x. I’m skeptical however that you can transfer your extraordinary abilities to your team members. The most brilliant productive people I cant imagine they can truly transfer that to others. Their ability comes off more like a God given gift, so to speak. Surely they add value individually and add value to each team member by their guidance and mentorship. The 10x concept though somewhat confuses the truly important question, both to the technical programmer employee and their capitalist business bosses. How much value is really being added and at what cost.

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juandazapata 9y ago

Click bait. Even the author recognizes it in the very first paragraph.

aylmao 9y ago

I know it's hyperbole and I'm being nit-picky but come on, 100x? 10x already sounds a bit like exaggeration, but implying there's an engineer out there who can do the same amount of work in 3-4 days as a normal engineer in a year is too much lol.

afinlayson 9y ago
Depends on how many direct reports the person can scale to. But I agree 100x is a little high. If you have a 10 person team and they all can do 2x what an unled team, The math might work out to be a 10x team lead. But there I go trying to use Math to justify hyperbole...
trendia 9y ago
I can think of an example, though even this is somewhat of astretch: Suppose person A takes 40 hours to write C code to manipulate a large data set. Person B puts the data in a database and is able to write commands, which only take 10 minutes, to achieve roughly the same thing.
- aylmao 9y ago
  Oh, I can see this, ok. I've spent an hour or so googling and debugging something before asking someone who knows the answer and does it in like 30 seconds hahah. Person A should've considered alternatives and asked around before spending a week on that manipulation lol.
esturk 9y ago
100x'ers do exist. But by Lokta's Law, they occur about 1 in 10000. Usually, a 10x'er is only 1/100 so they are much easier to find. You probably know them as Fellow/Staff Engineers.

ianstallings 9y ago

Good content in your guide to your new tech leads, laying out expectations right up front and giving them guidance. Most companies don't have anything like that, in my experience.

argimenes 9y ago

Why not a 1,000,000,000x engineer? There, I win.

pro_zac 9y ago

I've found the key to being an effective tech lead is to look at the team as an extension of yourself. As a senior engineer there is only so much you can do. Given the right team, you can do much more. This requires you do the planning and specifications, and occasionally pick off the difficult task. However, you must balance your engineering time against the productivity of the team. My number one goal as a lead is always for my team to come in and work without interruption. Everything they need to complete a task should be in the task management software. This is what I want as a dev, and so is what I aim to provide for my devs. This doesn't mean writing all the specs myself. Give the devs enough info to write their own tasks and review them before they start. This is manageable up to about 6 people. If you have a bigger team, then you need sub-leads to spread the load.

Tomminn 9y ago
Or, to be glib, you now program programmers, and so code in the highest level programming language of all.

imh 9y ago

1) Can mods change the title to something not-clickbait, maybe even related to the content of the article? The author acknowledges it's trash and does it anyways, but we don't have to. Perhaps "The Webflow Tech Lead Guide" 2) Does anyone know of any data to support the 10x/100x idea? I hear it thrown around so much, but it's always struck me as an echo chamber kind of self affirmation to support questionable hiring practices and cop-outs.

afinlayson 9y ago

Yes, but the wrong one can be 100x the failure. This goes for all leadership positions.

bm1362 9y ago

I've been a tech lead in the past and am currently a tech lead for a 1-man project. I agree with the sentiments here: if you're contributing a significant amount of code then you're probably failing the rest of the team in some way. It's hard to be on top of everyone else's work, the architecture, the weekly planning and the external team syncs while also trying to write features. Being alone, I'm basically taking shortcuts to get results until I have more bandwidth or get a team member to help shore things up. The goals and deadlines were set way above my head so unfortunately outcomes are prioritized as it stands.

megamindbrian2 9y ago

The only "work that matters" is growing food and service people. The rest of this up and coming technology bubble is hubris.

trendia 9y ago
I understand how you grow food, but how do you grow service people?
joejerryronnie 9y ago
Yes, but we also need soldiers to keep other soldiers from taking the food. And stone keeps and villages with market places to trade food for goods. And better farming techniques to increase our food production. Also, some more advanced machines to allow better food processing and some textiles. We probably need something a little more efficient than water or steam power. And logistics! Definitely need a way to get people and goods from one place to another. At some point, we'll need to organize all this activity better and start to specialize. Maybe there's a better way to track all this stuff than manual ledgers. Wait, we can leverage electricity and simple lever machines (up/down or 0/1 if you will) for tracking this stuff. Perhaps if we connected all these machines together into some kind of a network . . .
- megamindbrian2 9y ago
  If every neighborhood had a lot designed to produce food for every person +1 we wouldn't need so much logistics and lever machines.

bluesnowmonkey 9y ago

How am I supposed to write a spec so detailed that Junior engineers can build it? To be a tech lead you have to do waterfall development?

acconrad 9y ago

I really don't understand what the difference is between tech lead and engineering manager after reading this article. I did exactly these things and also people management as an EM but I spent 75% coding/code review and 25% in meetings/one-on-ones. 30% seems awfully low for a tech lead; is this just like a new term that's been recently birthed in job descriptions? It seems like it's for companies that are too small to have principal software engineers/architects and also too small to have a management track, but they have EMs at Webflow so I'm really curious what the author does in his day-to-day.

Madmallard 9y ago

I think with these multipliers itd be better just understanding the IQs of the people involved. Two of the most influential Tech Leads of our time had ~160 IQs by estimates: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.