One of my close friend once asked me, what do you do as a tech lead at a normal day? I had not thought the question at the time. I summarized a lot. The list goes on and on. After listing a lot, I confessed. I quit coding.
I have contributed code for ten years. Despite changing companies, I managed to keep my routine since. Everyday, I pick assigned stories and get them implemented. No fuss.
That has become auxiliary things for me now. I still write scripts, or walk through the codebase every now and then, but I commit code only when the team needs me.
My wife thought a tech lead writes code for harder problems. But after a long conversation, we concluded:
A tech lead has the big picture of all tech savvy in mind and helps other people to get things done.
I felt anxious of becoming a code-less tech lead at first, even with a lot of readings.
Before becoming a tech lead, my ex-manager thought me too “productive”. Good for me but not good for the team. I contributed most of the team OKRs for a quarter. And he thought I should deliver things slower and wait for team members to catch up.
As a programmer, I did not get that. The company pays me to get things done. Why not just get things done in time?
