Right, I agree with you that I am not filling the shoes of what I should be doing, and that is one of the reasons I'm not happy here, but that's not due to lack of awareness or effort on my part. I have never had issues communicating to non-technical people before. My previous managers have always commended me on my communication skills. In the past I consistently raised issues and potential areas of for improvement, explained the significance, and came to agreements with the product and project managers on a reasonable balance between continually improving our systems, maintenance, and adding new features. There is also another huge factor that complicates things, that is out of my control -- our systems are tied to a partner company and to a large extent they have determined our technology because our apps run in their servers, on their datacenter. So we've been stuck on Windows 2000, SQL Server 2000, running COM+ stuff, because those guys never upgrade their crap.

However, some projects to improve systems and to finally start looking at decoupling from the external partner are FINALLY showing up on the roadmap for 2013. I spent all of 2012 on a brand new project where I enforced my vision of how things should work (totally modern tech stack, automated builds, cloud deployments, etc). That project was a big success.

So if I were to stay one of the things I want to know is how I can convince my manager to get out of the way more, and let me handle a bigger role in planning and executing the projects. Because even though the projects are coming up, he is already starting to try to "mentor" the jr dev's by trying to get them to "own" specific new projects and feature areas for things that we'll do in 2013. I strongly disagree with this approach; I want team ownership, but with his hub and spoke approach (my +1 being the hub) to managing, there is no real development team. The Jr. dev's practically never increase their skills because they spend so much time on legacy code and tedious operational stuff that can be handled by interns (i've recommended this before, buy my manager doesn't agree).

Your point is well taken though, and it's something I've been thinking about. I would welcome any advice on how to arrange a better environment for myself at the company, that would allow me more autonomy in leading the developers. How do other lead developers at small startups handle this kind of situation? Who assigns tasks directly to developers? My manager micro-manages, and assigns individual tasks to individual developers. I know that if I got to lead the team myself I'd have been able to incrementally upgrade parts of the system to free up the Jr. developers' time, and by today they'd have a lot more free time to work on even more new features. How do I discuss this kind of thing with my manager without offending his clear need to maintain strong control over the Jr. developers?