The Effective Tech Lead Is a 100x Engineer
&gt; The Tech Lead is a “hybrid” role with one foot in management and the other in engineering<p>I may have a limited experience but I&#x27;ve never seen an effective Tech Lead who was a hybrid like this and I have serious doubts it&#x27;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 &quot;management&quot; they do then becomes more defensive&#x2F;territorial than directing&#x2F;guiding. In the end they end up more of a dev with super powers who has a veto over every other developer&#x27;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&#x27;t delegate at all and actually communicate even less than they did as an individual contributor.