“The tech lead role is not a point on the ladder, but a set of responsibilities that any engineer may take on once they reach the senior level. This role may or may not include people management, but if it does, the tech lead is expected to manage these team members to the high management standards of RTR tech. These standards include: Regular (weekly) 1-1 touchbases Regular feedback on career growth, progression towards goals, areas for improvement, and praise as warranted Working with reports to identify areas for learning and helping them grow in these areas via project work, external learning, or additional mentoring If a tech lead is not managing directly, they are still expected to provide mentorship and guidance to the other members of the team. The tech lead is learning how to be a strong technical project manager, and as such, they are scaling themselves by delegating work effectively without micromanaging. They focus on the whole team’s productivity and strive to increase the impact of the team’s work product. They are empowered to make independent decisions for the team and are learning how to handle difficult management and leadership situations. They are also learning how to partner effectively with product, analytics, and other areas of the business. It is not required that an engineer work as a tech lead to progress, but it is the most common way for engineers to grow from senior engineer 1 -> 2 and is required to grow from senior engineer 2 to engineering lead. Realistically it is very hard to grow past senior engineer 2 without ever having acted as a tech lead, even on the individual contributor track, due to the importance at senior levels of leadership and responsibility.”

这儿的定义其实更加偏向于Tech Lead Manager，不仅需要做管理的工作，很大一部分重心还会在技术上。如何带好内部的团队，以及和外部相关团队打交道，并做好计划等等。国内互联网对一线经理基本上就是这种要求，在湾区这边的科技公司，一般把管理岗和技术岗区分的相对比较开，Engineering Manager (不同于TLM)考核标准主要还是看团队开不开心，平级的相关团队对团队的评价，团队的总产出等等。TLM基本上还是比较少见的，是一种平衡技术和管理的岗位，对大的团队（大于10人）基本上很难平衡，因为管理的相关事宜就很多了。

“Perhaps a better shorthand for this is the description used by Patrick Kua in his book, Talking with Tech Leads: A leader, responsible for a (software) development team, who spends at least 30 percent of their time writing code with the team. Tech leads are in the position to act as strong technical project leaders, and to use their expertise at a larger scale so that their whole team gets better. They can make independent decisions, and they play a big role in coordinating with other nonengineering partners that their team might have. You’ll note that there’s nothing here about specifically technical work. This is a senior engineering role, but it’s a mistake to tie the notion of tech lead to one that boils down to the best or most experienced engineer on the team. You can’t lead without engaging other people, and people skills are what we’re asking the new tech lead to stretch, much more than pure technical expertise. However, tech leads will be working on one major new technical skill: project management. The work of breaking down a project has a lot of similarity to the work of designing systems, and learning this skill is valuable[…]”

这里提到了TL除了技术外还需要有好的沟通协调能力，拆解项目并管理项目的能力。