What To Expect When Becoming A Lead Engineer

The transition from a senior to a lead position is a huge change. You don’t deal with code that much but rather with people.

xeladu
6 min readAug 22, 2024
Photo by Rommel Davila on Unsplash

In my first job as a software engineer, I thought I knew everything. It took me a few months and nose dives to realize that this wasn’t true at all. We’ve probably all heard about the Dunning-Kruger effect that describes this phenomenon. And I totally fell for it.

Dunning-Kruger effect explanation from psychologytoday.com

After I started to accept my limited knowledge, I grew a lot in the following months and years by listening to and working with senior engineers and tech leads.

Whenever I had questions I could consult them. In the beginning they gave me a helping answer right away. But over the years, the questions become more complicated and the answers weren’t that clear anymore. However, they always had stories to tell from previous experiences and what worked well. I sticked to their advice, gained more experience, and can benefit from it today.

Recently, I was promoted to a tech lead position (sadly without a salary increase, at least not yet 😢). I immediately accepted…

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xeladu
xeladu

Written by xeladu

Flutter and Firebase expert, blogger on QuickCoder.org, find my ebooks and freebies on shop.quickcoder.org, contact me on me.quickcoder.org!