Tech Lead Q&A and Videos

Hello,

I am working as an Entry level engineer at mid size product based company. In my end year performance review, I got a feedback that I can work on improving my debugging and technical skills more. As well as, knowledge of other features and overall product as a whole would need to be increased as well.

My Tech lead has offered to mentor me by conducting 1:1 sessions to help me improve at debugging and help identify patterns and teach basic principles. 2 other senior engineers on the team also reached out and offered to conduct sessions regularly with me, for which I am really grateful.

For more context, all my teammates work remotely, so it is not beneficial to go to office. My question is, how can I best utilize these sessions with the senior engineers on team to improve more and skill up? That is, what kind of preparation/ questions should I have ready to make the most of these sessions?

I'm doing a soon: I'll use this thread to collect questions and will follow up to answer anything we don't cover within the hour.

I'm Sanjay ( / ) -- I'm a Stanford grad (same as Rahul), where I got a BS in Computer Science and MS in Biomedical Informatics. I've built my entire career in the Bay Area, with the past 5 years at AKASA, an AI healthcare company to help revenue cycle teams.

I'm the Senior Director of Engineering at AKASA. I joined AKASA in 2019 as one of the first employees when we were a seed-stage startup. I originally joined AKASA as an individual contributor, and quickly switched over to management. I built much of the company's early technology as an IC and later as a tech lead / manager. I also started and managed multiple engineering teams at the company, including Platform Engineering, now an org with 20 engineers.

Happy to answer questions about:

• How engineering leaders think about the role of Senior, Staff, and Principal ICs
• How and why to transition from IC to management
• The differences between an Engineering Manager vs Engineering Director
• How to hire and retain great talent
• How to succeed in a startup environment

I can also discuss how to introduce effective development processes (code reviews, agile development, postmortems, planning, etc) in early-stage companies and how to evolve these practices as a company grows.

I was assigned a P1 bug, and when I started to dig deeper into it, I found out that actual code was written by some other team and we have just used that code/object to build a small feature. I got a bit lucky that someone in my team told that the team ‘A’ owns that code/object. I was given a POC, but it turns out that they have left that team. I would like to have a POC to close out this bug.

For additional context: It is still not clear if it's the feature or the bug that's broken, that’s why we need to get clarification from the other team. Here's a high-level example to make things more clear: There is an object named "Product" which is a generic one, team ‘A’ built another object called "Product Category", and we added a field to that object. Now unless I ask some senior folks in my team it is really hard to understand who owns "Product Category".

Given all these unknowns, how can I navigate this situation and make sure this bug is resolved properly?

I'll be going into Amazon as a senior engineer leading a team of 6-7 engineers. I have some anxiety as I have never worked in a FAANG company before, and I imagine the bar is high. Things are also trickier as I'll be in a different time zone from the rest of the team.

How can I make a stellar first impression after I start?

More often than not, problems are enlisted in quarterly roadmaps.

From a tech complexity perspective, how do you evaluate problems which are highly complex in nature. If such problems don't exist in my team or if they exist but don't generate high outcome, should I look for outside my team to solve such problems?

hi all,

I am a tech lead for my team of 5 engineers. I am also a senior eng intending to climb up to staff level.

My manager is not very vocal or supportive and seems reluctant in terms of helping out a plan for myself. I have been working hard though. How can I work with my manager to create a promotion plan for myself and get buy-in from them?

I am not sure if I should move up the eng ladder or transition to management, but are there any guidelines for creating a written promotion plan and manage up so to speak?

1. What are the things you can suggest to reduce the turnaround time for onboarding a new engineer within the team?
2. What are the things that can enable them better?
3. How does this differ based on the stage of their career at which the new hire is in?

What should I think about and focus my efforts on when I get a project and a role that's of (1) bigger scope and (2) tighter deadlines than I'm used to?

Context

A reorg has suddenly thrust me into the TL role for a very high-profile project on a new team. This project is part of OKRs 4 levels up the chain and has the eyes of several director level people across different functions. From what I've heard, this project already suffered from "too many cooks in the kitchen" syndrome, and on top of that, this project has delivery date set in Q3, which is quite aggressive from our org's standards.

I've landed in this position because I was transitioning to this team prior to the reorg, AND the EM/TL/PM/2 L5s has been reorg'ed out, and they needed someone who had previously TL experience and was willing to do it.

I've previously TL'ed a team of 4 people, with important but "normal" priority projects. This is clearly a great opportunity for me, but I am afraid I'm not ready to handle it and I'm at a bit of loss as to what I should be focusing most of my effort on. With the tight deadlines I have, I feel like every day will be a battle so any advice on how to approach this will be appreciated.

I have one other L5 supporting me who I trust very much and a new EM who's rumored to be very good. We currently have 4 SWE including me and we'll be getting more at least 4 more engineers, with lots of adjacent teams helping out. I do also have good standing and connection in the org overall and I know how to get a "normal" project in our org over the line (I did an in-org transfer).

What I'm thinking about right now

1. Knowledge Transition: since a lot of critical members of the team are leaving and I am taking over, I feel the biggest priority in the near term is to absorb as much knowledge from them as possible. So far, they have some prototypes, and I wanted to get my hands dirty, so maybe I should focus on is to understand the work that's been done really well, and the design choices that's been made already?
2. Gather support: I feel like biggest personal risk is that I don't know how to show up in higher-stake meetings with directors. Is it any different? Where do you all see the risk is?
3. Enable the team: I know the biggest responsibility I have, more than anything, is to make sure the team is able to work on the project and help us deliver this. Aside from the L5, I don't know a lot about the people. I feel I should putting my focus on ensuring they are as successful as possible, not focusing on my own technical knowledge as much, for us to succeed. Is that a good way to think about it?
4. Self-management: I anticipate I'll be very stressed and pulled in many directions. I already feel this way. What are some tools I can leverage in "crunch time"?

I have realised over the years that I have gained good amount of technical knowledge but I lack great communication skills (in terms of expressing my thoughts). This was okay till I was working as software engineer as my task involved more of coding work which does not require explaining things to large audience. Now as a Senior Engineer my task revolves around making design choices, explaining pros/cons of selecting an approach etc. I realised that even though I am confident on my technical approach, I sometimes fail to express myself and the approach in the right way during the discussion which led to times when my approach is discarded and others as selected as they express themselves better. I need some suggestions on how to improve on this aspect as this will be crucial part going forward in my career.

I joined Amazon for my first tech job as an SDE I and was able to promote to SDE II after 1 year. Fast forward to 9 months after promotion, My onboarding buddy who has been here ever since the team was founded is leaving. I ended up being the SME for one of the team's projects that makes a lot of $$$, which means a lot of eyes are on it. Although we do have a couple SDE IIIs on the team, they've been more focused on other equally important projects and don't have too much knowledge on this one. I'm starting to feel the weight of the extra responsibility as I often get pinged for escalations, have a lot more say in meetings, and invited to meetings for the roadmap of this project. There was also a recent reshuffle in the Product side and I've become their go-to guy for anything related to this project.

Having joined the industry less than 2 years ago, I kind of feel like things are really moving fast and I'm a bit overwhelmed to be honest. I was still thinking on how to increase my technical depth after promotion, and I'm not even sure if this is a good situation to be in or not. But at the same time, I do want to overcome this and perhaps turn this situation into a growth opportunity.

In my forte review, there were many comments on the expectation of me evolving into a mature leader for the team and this feels like an opportunity to work on that. I'm kind of confused on what direction to take at the moment. What would be some things I can do to make the most of this opportunity and grow my leadership skills? I feel like before all this happened, I was focusing on growing my technical skills and didn't really pay atttention much to the leadership side.

This might be a vague question, so I just wanted to see if anyone has been in this situation and have any advice on how to best navigate this or share similar experiences

I work mostly with other senior engineers and the tech lead in my team. I discuss any technical stuff, how to implement my projects, what to do next, etc. with them. With my manager, I meet once every two weeks and update what I am doing.

I actually now wonder what's really the role of an engineering manager as tech leads seem to do most of the work in managing the team. Is it to help with people conflicts, hiring, and performance reviews? That doesn't seem like a lot of work.