Wednesday, August 22, 2007
The Role of the Technical Lead
Within many enterprises, the role of the technical lead is growing in importance. I am of the belief that it is primarily due to us architect types doing nothing but drawing cartoons in Powerpoint and doing handwaving. Someone needs to address the communications gap between architects and developers and hence the creation of this most important role...
A good "technical lead" should be able to understand the issues of concern to architects, and a good architect should be able to understand the concerns of development and maintenance programmers. A willingness to align and communicate should be the trait of both types of people.
It is too much to ask for an architect to be conversant with the details of programming (e.g. give estimates on project design and programming costs). Likewise, one should not ask the "technical lead" about the implications of infrastructure decisions.
I suspect that the trend towards non-technical folks leading IT will start to also reach the architect community. It is kinda intriguing that there are some that believe you can be an architect without ever having ever written code nor managed infrastructure. For shops that employ these types of individuals, please leave a comment with your employers ticker symbol so that I can short your stock...
| | View blog reactionsA good "technical lead" should be able to understand the issues of concern to architects, and a good architect should be able to understand the concerns of development and maintenance programmers. A willingness to align and communicate should be the trait of both types of people.
It is too much to ask for an architect to be conversant with the details of programming (e.g. give estimates on project design and programming costs). Likewise, one should not ask the "technical lead" about the implications of infrastructure decisions.
I suspect that the trend towards non-technical folks leading IT will start to also reach the architect community. It is kinda intriguing that there are some that believe you can be an architect without ever having ever written code nor managed infrastructure. For shops that employ these types of individuals, please leave a comment with your employers ticker symbol so that I can short your stock...
