Eiso: Welcome to developing leadership, the podcast where I, Eiso Kant and my co-host Jason Warner, talk about the lessons we've learned about engineering leadership throughout the years.

Today we closed the chapter on our deep dive into different engineering leadership roles and cover some of the most common questions about engineering managers and tech leads. Such as how to pick your first tech lead in, should you promote from within or bring somebody new, and the fallacy of non-engineers managing engineering teams, how the roles of detect lead and EMs change as the organization grows and, much more. As always, if there are specific terms or topics you would like to learn more about check out this episode's show notes, linked in the description.

[00:00:43] Hey everyone, I hope everybody had a good week. Jason and I are back actually for part three of our three part series on engineering leaders at different levels and different stages. And, you know, what do the roles mean, and how does the progression look like as your company changes from an early stage startup to hopefully a large behemoth?

[00:01:05] And so in our last episode, we ended on talking about the role of the director, and so today we're going to kick off on the next level in the organization and where the rubber starts hitting the road even more so, the engineering manager, the Tech Lead and the team construction that sits from there. So, Jason, I'm going to start you off with an easy one, your first engineering manager hire, or your first tech lead hire at a small startup. What does that look like? What do we have to look for? And. What's actually the difference between Tech Lead and EM, and how should people think about it at this stage?

[00:01:41] Jason: Awesome. Yes. So this is probably one of the more common questions and it actually starts out of, "Hey, I think I want to hire a Head of Engineering." Typically, whenever someone asks me, I want to hire my first Head of Engineering, we get into, "talk me through your EM structure with your Tech Leads," even faster. And the reason why is most people are sitting there at a certain size, let's just call it like 10 to 12 to 15 people somewhere in that range. And they're starting to say, "I can't do all this myself anymore." And we start to have that conversation about head of, and which quickly becomes, how have you organized your company at the moment and talk me through managers and Tech Leads.

[00:02:19] So here's roughly how I think about these, is that when you're small enough early enough and kind of growing, to go top down from the organization engineering manager, or sorry, VP, Head of Engineering, Director, and kind of build that way too hierarchal. It's almost like waterfall organizational construct, as opposed to building up organically, just what you need just in time as you do it. And so this is where Tech Leads and Managers come in. And why I say Tech Leads and Managers is because I think the first thing you actually need to do is Tech Leads. Most CTOs who are founding members of the team should say, "I'm going to start putting tech leads in place to handle day-to-day stuff like PRs and code reviews and make sure the right tasks are being worked on and things of that nature.

[00:03:03] Well, you yourself in all likelihood, the CTO or somebody like you is handling more of the one-on-ones or the organizational things, but you're not going to go redo it all at once by hiring top staff. But then you get ready and your tech lead is starting to get stretched too. And you yourself have too many people, maybe around 15 to 18 to 20 mark. And then you start talking about managers. And the managers come in and you say, "all right, I'm going to pair you with a tech lead. You're going to become a pod of people on a very specific focus. And you're going to basically break up the duties of one side technical, one side organizational, and be paired together in that way." At the root of it, at the simplest, that's how I think about it. Tech Lead handle day-to-day Tech, Manager handle day-to-day people.

[00:03:45] Nobody's really thinking about the long, long, long, long long-term outside of the CTO yet. And I mean, long term, in terms of like organizational philosophy, career ladders, HR review processes. No one's doing that just yet, and like likely don't need it just yet either. So you can go that route and still and still continue to build as fast as possible.

[00:04:06] Eiso: So I'm probably going to hit you with your second most common question that you get is around the notion of, "Hey, do I promote from within, do I bring somebody in?" And you know, there's the sad, I actually, I don't like it, I don't even believe it's true. But there is kind of the notion or almost joke in our industry of like, you know, "Who is going to be leading the team? Well I walk in the room and I see who actually speaks up."

[00:04:29] And frankly, I personally really hate that we say this in our industry. I spend a lot of my time with engineers and frankly, I think it's, it's a fallacy. I think we don't give people enough room to develop into leaders and has absolutely nothing to do with who's the first person willing to speak up. But that's kind of the state of a lot of companies, you know, of how they kind of pick their first tech lead. How do you look at this and, and where should that first tech lead and EM come from and how are they different?

[00:04:55] Jason: It's funny that you say that, because I think it's actually less to do with obviously who speaks up and who actually does the work. And who does the work is just, go and look at GitHub, who is actually commenting on the code reviews and who is, who is having those conversations in Slack or wherever you're having them more and GitHub, et cetera, and chiming in on the issues. And you have to kind of use a little bit of stupid human trick here territory too, see who people respect in there, because somebody can speak and everyone stops listening, and another person can say two words and everyone is hanging on those two words because they carry so much weight and you need to be tuned into the organization to do this.

[00:05:33] But where do I look? I try to look for tech leads almost exclusively internally. They need to have some context, Managers can come from outside and likely do in many scenarios. So, it's highly likely you, you have a manager as well, but it's almost guaranteed, you should have had at least one Tech Lead from inside. But this also goes to engineering hiring philosophy.

[00:05:53] So let me take a step back and say this, let's say you have 10 people in your organization. I'm going to break the world into amateurs, pro-ams and rookies. And maybe that might be a divisive way to say that, but like, let's just call it, early in your career, you're basically are amateur status as an engineer. You have a skill set, but you don't know the full totality of the game that's being played yet. So you need to sit there, perform your skillset, but learn the rest of the game and the nuance of it before you can move on to the higher ranking of the Pro-Am status to become a pro. And then when you're a pro you can become a Hall of Famer. There's like a simple progression. But I'm just going to lay it out that way.

[00:06:24] If you're a 10 person startup and you're filled up with pro-ams, you're in trouble, because you have no one to actually teach the nuances or to help people understand that. And if you're 10 person startup and you have all pros, you're likely also in trouble because you're too far outside the bounds of balance where somebody somewhere is going to say "that job is not for me. It might be even below me." by the way, that's a bad culture fit in almost all startups as well, but it happens, it happens more often than we'll want to admit too.

[00:06:52] I suggest a balance. I think that you're going to want to end up with the majority of pros, let's say out of 10, you're going to have five, or four of those. And then at the minimum three. So just I'm giving ranges here, just to give you an idea. Then you could fill two, three, almost, think of it as a bell curve. Whatever that number is, try to do the other side of pro-ams, and then the bulk filled up the middle filled up, I'm sorry, amateurs. And then the other filled up with pro-ams. So again, 10 people, three pros, three amateurs, the rest pro-ams, and they kind of have a good ratio in the middle there.

[00:07:27] Now, obviously that gets to your own ability to understand who is which level then too. But I'm just trying to give you a way to think about that.