EM is pushing TL responsibilities on me even after saying no to the offer for being the TL. How to navigate this?
Basically the title. He said that's okay that I don't want to be a TL but now he's pushing TL responsibilities on me without the official title. He's officially an interim TL right now. Some of the new requests I'm starting to get rn: "Can you make sure X gets their work done?" "Very excited about project A! Can you sync with X to make sure it is done within this sprint?" "Y is blocked on something, can you help?" "Can you scope this out, create a ticket and assign it to X?" Very early in my career, how to navigate this? I'm not interested on being a TL at the moment for some personal reasons. I do recognise this is an amazing career opportunity so early in the career. Experience: 8 months TC: 160k #engineering #software #swe
I feel at ur stage, you should be focusing on your core skills, and not people skills
Just tell your manager you want to focus on hands on stuff at this stage of your career
1. Repeat that you're not interested in being a TL. 2. If it persists, change teams.
Unfortunately changing team is not an option since the EM is EM of all the teams. Small startup with very few teams.
Then leave the company.
Were they going to pay you more and bump up your title? If you're at 8 months experience you're either very talented or getting taken advantage of hard
Why not give it a shot?
well it’s your EM so you probably can’t just ignore. and you can’t deflect with “that will impact my other work”. so you either risk saying no, or you do it very poorly. for all the X ones you can maybe say, i’m not in a leadership role so i don’t feel comfortable assigning work to others or directing their activities for the Y one you probably should just do it. why wouldn’t you help someone that’s blocked? as long as it’s direct help and not telling X to do something
I faced a similar scenario, few months in the job, asked to be tech lead and got promoted twice in a year, but I couldn’t sleep at night because I’m afraid I couldn’t deliver. Left after a few years