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Comment by alharith | Hacker News Reader

I would advise you to not take the position. It would be a disaster in my opinion to attempt to be a tech lead without years of experience at the senior level. Your high level engineers will catch whiff of your lack of experience. Your mid and associate levels will not accelerate as fast as they could have, and you will feel over your head. You will essentially be Peter Principaling yourself.

If you are going to do it, read a ton of books. Minimum in my opinion are: 1. The Managers Path -- general advise 2. Coaching Habit -- for performing 1 on 1s 3. Extreme Ownership -- for building an effective culture that delivers results.

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I think it depends on the context. if the organization is overall reasonably competent and the engineers turn out to be relatively low drama this can work out great.

some dev organizations I have use a rotating release shepherd osition (gatekeeper). it usually works out pretty well, and junior engineers get a taste of what its like to live on the other side. its perfectly functional for a senior engineer to mentor a junior manager.

the one thing that concerns me about this story is hiring. my first tech lead position they gave me some heads and I promptly hired two smart-talking bozos with years of experience that wasted my time for several months until thankfully one of them quit and I got up the courage to fire the other.

It won't be a disaster as long as they're humble and willing to learn.

My direct report is humble and most willing to learn. That doesn't mean they aren't at the end of the day still a very green associate developer with 7 months of experience so far. Any talks about reaching senior developer status any time soon would be a huge disservice to their development. We need to first talk about what being an exceptional associate developer looks like, transitioning to being a mid level developer.

You can't shortcut these things.

Really good coding/architecture skills or able to collaborate and seek opinion and input from others.

For me as long as people have one or the other I can work with it. I've often been in scenarios with people that aren't good and won't collaborate and THAT'S the hell.

Obviously both is best but the skill set is rare. I'll happily take someone that defers to me and trusts my judgement over the HELL. Its not ideal and doesn't result in the best outcomes but its still workable.

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