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Discussion on: What is the hardest part of your job?

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molly profile image
Molly Struve (she/her)

I recently became a technical lead and now I have a team of 2 that I am responsible for. At first, I assumed that I, plus 2 more people meant that we would get 3x as much work done as before and it would be a piece of cake. Oh boy, how wrong I was! Leading a team is HARD WORK! Figuring out exactly how much support each member needs and how to best give it to them while also continuing to technically contribute myself is tough. I have had to accept that contributing less is OK because my time is better spent sharing my knowledge and helping others on my team grow.

TL;DR The hardest part of my job is learning how to effectively lead a team.

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Jaime López • Edited

I was in that position for two years more or less and was easy for me, my team was so proactive that was easy to advice and help when was necessary. I had to face one person going out of the team even the company and replace them with another person less qualified. None of those challenges modified my way of working, I did a daily starting meeting (like a daily scrum meeting) to schedule their tasks for the day. This allowed me to check what they were doing and identify their issues to plan helping chats. In addition, you have to assume you spend some time managing your team and you will not doing the same tasks as before, in some way, you are the expert and has to start the way of doing things or remove the rocks from the path.

Hope this can help you.

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Mauro Franchi

I am in the same situation! The hardest part for me is coping with the lack of actual coding time as I spend most of the time planning, assigning task and review everybody's else PRs. I feel like I am just less than 1/2 Dev in the team.

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Zohar Peled

Leading a team takes a very different skill set then developing software. I've had different sizes of dev teams working under me - but for me, even managing myself is a hard thing, and managing other people as well is even harder.