What is technical leadership? Per Mature Developers, it's a lot of things. My favorites:
So one of the first and most important qualities of mature developers is they’re more often than not paying attention to what is going on around them. They’re deliberately taking their time to observe before proceeding (put succinctly as STOP; Stop, Take a breath, Observe, Proceed).
It is so hard for me to do the stop and breath part.
Sharing the [technical] vision with other involved parties not only serves as a perfect opportunity for practicing one’s skills to explain deeply technical terms and circumstances with non-technical people. It also serves the purpose to validate the vision in terms of relevance to business value and other aspects.
Assessing and understanding risks better puts them into a position where it’s also more likely they’ll actually take risks. Risks which, without the knowledge about business value and the bigger context, may look too big to be worthwhile. But not for mature developers who are able to see beyond the obvious risks and include more aspects into their judgement.
Managing risk, but not overmanaging it: also very difficult.
Previously: Thoughts on “Being a Senior Engineer”.
