I have about 13 years of tech experience. Some as a software dev with open source languages, some as an on-site consultant with proprietary languages.
My first experience as a lead came involuntarily. I was the most senior dev, and a lead left the company. I was kind of forced into filling his role. I am in the US, and the 3 or so people under me were all from India. The time zone difference made communication with them very hard. I didn't enjoy the position. I felt as if I had more responsibilities without more authority. I left shortly afterwards.
At my next few jobs, being a dev felt like I was on "easy mode". Almost too easy. I started to feel that I have nothing new to learn as a dev... All of the frameworks seemed the same to me, just regurgitating the same functionality in a different format.
Onto the company where I am now: I started as a dev. Although I was getting lots of work done, there was a clear vacuum of leadership. Poor communication, lots of technical debt, new people had no guidance and had to learn everything on their own.
I told management multiple times that we lack a lead, and asked if we would be getting one. After several months, management asked if I would be interested in being the lead. Especially with regards to dealing with the technical debt. I said yes, because I felt I was filling a very important yet lacking void.
That was 6 months ago. Things have been quite exciting since then. For the first time in forever, I actually felt challenged, doing new things. I have been on my toes, switching from one issue to another. It started with handling the technical debt, then training the new people, then trying to use the team resources most effectively. Along the way, I have been gaining the trust of the people I lead, acting as the communication glue of the team, and being transparent with everyone.
I end up having to handle everything that is not a coding task. This included creating new access roles, assigning them to people and to service accounts, configuring message queues, releasing code, etc.
I would love to delegate some of this stuff. The problem is my boss took on too many projects and was forced to take a bunch of people from my team to cover those other projects. I am left with few people, running quite lean.
Much of the people working in the team are quite shy, or not very good at communicating. I end up being the speaker for much of the team, especially when talking up with management.
Last month, a person on my team asked to talk with me privately... She then told me, her contract is being cut short, ending work that week. The sad part is, she found this out from her contracting agency. No one told her about it up till then.. And then she basically started pleading with me if there was any way she could keep her job. This made me quite sad and angry. I called up several managers involved, and had a long discussion with them about us losing a great resource, lack of communication, etc.... And incredibly, they listened to me. Sparing the details, l was able to keep her contract from ending.
Since then, I have felt quite confident in my position, being respected by both my team members and also my bosses. I started having one-on-ones with everyone making sure they are happy with what they are doing..
I have started to question, am I a lead or a manager? Although I do look at code when it needs to be done ASAP, for the most part I prefer to have someone else work on it. I don't really want to be the architect / designer of new code. I hope my team grows strong enough to make these decisions themselves.
Recently I told the team, we need to speed up our GUI and asked if anyone has any suggestions how to do this. My main GUI guy provided an idea which will require a lot of time and effort. But I can see it has potential. I told him to to for it, build a POC. I would like to encourage this kind of attitude more, for people to come up with their own solutions instead of just waiting for me to give them work..
In any case, this has been an exciting journey. It has really worked out well. I am lucky people listen to me. At least for now. I do continue to wonder, am I a lead or a manager?
I'm soon starting in a new company in the role as tech lead, and there they difference is that the tech lead is focused on anything technical (architecture decisions, language choices, deploy procedures, prioritizing and organizing issues, etc.), while the manager role covers anything HR related (performance reviews, 1-on-1s, etc.). There will be some overlap when it comes to mentoring, since I know that also falls under the tech lead role, but I think the split there will be that I focus on guiding the new people on anything tech related while the manager helps them with everything else.
There are also project managers in the mix at the new company, and my role there will be to together with them prioritize tasks to reach our goals and deliver good results - while making sure that the deadlines/estimates given are sensible. The manager person will not be involved here, since this is all project/tech related and not HR related.
At my previous job I had a more combined tech lead and manager role (was a small startup, so that makes everything a bit different), and there I found that I enjoyed the tech responsibilities while I'll be very happy to avoid all the other management parts.