Team Lead on Morgan Bye

So, you wanna be a team lead

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

There comes a point in most developer’s career when you’ll start wondering whether or not to become a team lead.

Maybe you’ve received some positive feedback that you’re good with people. Maybe your team has been without a leader for a while, and you’ve naturally stepped into more of a technical lead role.

But there’s still a part of you that’s hesitant.

Until now, you’ve spent years honing your craft - not just being a good developer, but a great one. You’ve reached a point where coding mostly comes naturally. It doesn’t require the same effort it once did. Maybe there’s even a little prestige and ego involved. A reputation as the developer that people want on their team.

The line between solid and senior team lead

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 09:00:00 -0400

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what “seniority” really means for team leads and engineering managers.

I’ve been around long enough now that several of my mentees - people I helped grow into team leads and supported through their first rocky quarters - are now coming into their own. They’ve run enough projects, seen enough team dynamics, and navigated enough delivery cycles that they’re starting to ask: what actually separates a good team lead from someone recognized as a senior one?

Dear Morgan - Do I reward heroics?

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

Dear Morgan

I’m near the end of a project, and time is tight—we haven’t even started one of the major deliverables.
I submitted a PR with a couple of workarounds. Not elegant, but it works.

A senior data scientist (who’s built most of the codebase) isn’t happy.

He’s proposed changes.
A lot of changes.

I explained: I’m fine with making updates, but we’ll need to restructure some things.

Instead, he completely rewrote it.
And introduced new problems in the process - including a tangle of circular dependencies.