Hi,
How can I become a team/department lead? I guess I’m starting to feel tired of having a vision and not being able to implement it because I have 0 political power in a company.
I thought that the easiest way was to join a startup as the first person of a “department” in a company, but now I’m not sure how it’s possible to get hired to a startup on the early stage.
Well, if meetings mean I can improve things for myself, my teammates, and company - I’m ok with that
It means you are invited to the most pointless stuff because someone from the team needs to attend and you have more experience on how the different teams interact (ideally, some people are there for the potential higher salary most companies structure management under).
Nothing of note happens 75% of the time (maybe being generous there). You just don’t want it to come to your team last minute about 2 weeks from release with high priority because it was “already discussed and agreed to” on some obscure 2 hour inter project planning session (recurring very boring biweekly meeting).
I had more power to affect things as a senior developer than a team lead on a previous company since I could actually make technical decisions and my boss (great person) trusted me since I spent most of my time trying to learn things (since I had the time to do so without the meetings).
I won’t tell you it could not work since you are allowed to make some calls based on your experience and intuition, which is nice and rewarding, but have realistic expectations to avoid being let down.