There's a pattern I keep running into and every senior engineer I've talked to recognizes it immediately but nobody writes about it because writing about it means questioning decisions made by people who control your career.
A company hires a tech lead from leadership's personal network. No real technical vetting, no input from the team that's going to work under this person. Just a relationship. And suddenly there's a new name on the org chart that everyone has to accommodate.
For the first few weeks it looks fine because asking questions is expected when you're new. But then the questions don't stop. And then you realize the tech lead isn't learning, they genuinely don't understand the technology they're supposed to be leading. They can't review a PR with any real depth. They can't help their developers debug anything. They can't make architectural decisions because they don't understand the architecture well enough to evaluate tradeoffs.
I've been building software for 25 years and I've seen this play out at multiple companies. What happens next is always the same.
Your team starts doing two jobs
The senior engineers quietly start compensating. Not because anyone asked but because the work needs to get done and the person who should be directing it can't. They answer questions the tech lead should be answering. They make decisions the tech lead should be making. They do code reviews the tech lead should be doing. Their workload doesn't shrink, it just gets a second layer of invisible work on top.
Leadership can't see this because the dashboards look normal. Tickets move, code ships, nothing is on fire. The reason things work is because three people are doing four jobs but that doesn't show up in any metric anyone is tracking.
The blame starts flowing downhill
When something breaks and something always breaks the tech lead needs to explain what happened. But they can't explain it technically because they don't understand it technically. So the explanation becomes "we were blocked by the infrastructure team" or "the pipeline had issues" or "requirements were unclear." Always pointing away from their own team and toward someone else.
Leadership accepts this because the tech lead is their friend. Questioning the explanation means questioning their own hiring decision. Nobody does that voluntarily. So the team that was actually keeping things running absorbs the blame for problems they didn't create.
The quiet exodus
Here's where it gets expensive. The senior engineers who've been doing double work while watching someone less capable get the title and the trust don't explode. They don't send angry emails. They just decide quietly that they're done.
First one leaves, leadership calls it normal turnover. Second one leaves, someone starts to worry. Third one leaves and suddenly the team's institutional knowledge is gone. The tech lead who couldn't do a code review is now leading a team of people too junior to compensate for them. Everything gets slower, buggier, more fragile. And nobody connects it to the hiring decision from eighteen months ago because the narrative has been rewritten to "the market is tough" and "good people are hard to retain."
No. Good people are easy to retain. You just have to stop putting unqualified people in charge of them.
What I call Risk Management Theater
The organization has a tech lead on the org chart. The role is filled. Architecture reviews happen on schedule. The structure looks right from above. But nobody qualified is actually leading anything technical. The title exists to fill a box on an org chart. The actual work is done by people whose names leadership doesn't know because the person bridging that gap is too busy managing up to manage down.
I've been writing about this pattern and others like it. I call it Risk Management Theater: the appearance of governance without the substance of it. Organizations that look managed from above while being completely unmanaged underneath.
If you've ever been the person quietly holding things together while someone less qualified took the credit, you're not alone and you're not imagining it. The system works exactly this way on purpose. Not because someone designed it to be unfair but because the people who benefit from it have no incentive to fix it.
If any of this resonates, I wrote a free chapter about a related pattern: how the daily standup went from a collaboration tool to a daily performance where developers rehearse what they'll say every morning to avoid sounding behind. Same dynamic, different ceremony.
Top comments (2)
Thanks.
Solid read.