In the history article “How to Be a Good Technical Director?” Alibaba’s senior technical expert Yundi shared his understanding and thinking on TECHNICAL TL from three perspectives: development specification, development process, technical planning and management.

In today’s article, he will continue to discuss this topic in depth and share the core responsibilities of TTL from the perspective of management, including team building, team management, team culture, communication and coaching, recruitment and dismissal, etc. He hopes to discuss and exchange with you.

background

The technical team management of Internet companies is usually divided into two directions: technical management and team management. The technical TL of Internet companies is quite different from the PM of traditional software companies. The PM of traditional software companies pays more attention to project management, including project task dismantling, project schedule and risk. For most Internet companies, the TTL is more about understanding both the business and the technology beyond a project perspective, acting as a beacon in the dark that guides and corrects the direction of team members. I think deeply about problems from a comprehensive technical and business perspective, have certain foresight, and invest in continuous learning enthusiasm in the technical field, preach to team members, make up for shortcomings, and improve the effectiveness of the whole team.

Technical TL responsibilities not only need to formulate daily specifications, including development specifications and process specifications, promote the implementation of specifications, and avoid unnecessary internal friction with public compulsory agreement. In addition, more than half of the time may be spent on development task decomposition and allocation, development practice, technical architecture review, code review and risk identification. The rest of the time is spent planning, collaborating, communicating, and managing all the things needed to make sure the system is delivered on time.

Management guru Peter Drucker said, “The purpose of organization is to make ordinary people do extraordinary things.” However, not any group of ordinary people getting together can do extraordinary things. Even a group of good people together can be a mediocre organization. From a large country to a small team, any outstanding organization must have an outstanding leader. The leader is the soul of an organization, and to a large extent, the leader determines the height that the organization can achieve.

Ali has a local saying “ordinary people, extraordinary things”, the same is true of the technical team, the manager’s strategic vision, management methods, personality charm, etc., will bring a decisive impact on the team’s work results.

In fact, the background of each company and each team is different. There is no uniform standard answer to some questions discussed from the perspective of management. Some of the opinions in this paper are only personal opinions, and I have learned some excellent management ideas from my predecessors. They include jack Welch, THE CEO of GENERAL Electric whom I respect most, Steve Jobs, The CEO of Apple, Grove, and Robbin (the vice president of technology of Lilac Garden), the technology manager WHOM I admire most in China.

Team building

Since 2014, I have led this business technical team for five years. In retrospect, I have met all the problems I can meet in team management, and there are countless stumbles. I have learned lessons from practice. Here I would like to share the team building with you briefly, of course, there are also some things that are not good enough.

Everyone in Ali can feel the embrace of change. The organizational structure changes almost every year, and some teams even change every six months. In 2014, I was assigned to this team to take charge of this business, which was the business of a subsidiary acquired by the group. The culture and technology system of the whole team were very different from That of Ali. Generally speaking, a new TTL will hire a lot of people and push forward the reform quickly after it is parachuted in, and some TTL like to move in some of the old ones.

Instead of rushing into it and hiring a new employee, I focused on stabilizing the existing team for the following reasons:

  • Lack of deep understanding of the team and business: I do not know enough about the current team personnel and business to know what pits and traps there are. Once the initial battle is not good and the leader’s trust is overdrawn, I am afraid it will be difficult to get a foothold in the company, let alone talk about reforming the team and giving full play to my ability.

  • Process and system: In view of some problems existing in the current situation of the team, I preliminarily judge that the problems are not people’s problems, but some organizational, process and system problems. In my opinion, only a good system can create a good team. Recruiting new staff before solving the chronic problems of the existing team will not bring new productivity, but will cause chaos in the team. We should lay a good foundation before recruiting, so as to achieve twice the result with half the effort.

  • Team security: I don’t want existing team members to feel like a courtier, afraid that they will be marginalized in the team, become outcast. On the other hand, it can make the existing team psychologically safer and work well without more turbulence.

After several months of thorough understanding, I probably knew some problems and causes of the team at that time:

  • Non-standard business cooperation: there is no reasonable working process for cooperation among product, operation and R&D departments. For example, there is no PRD evaluation standard for product demand and no quantitative index for operation demand. Everyone is busy in making demands, leading to low enthusiasm of everyone.

  • Chaos of cross-team collaboration: there is no standard work cooperation between cross-departments, and departments shift responsibilities to each other. Any business personnel will give orders to r&d personnel at any time. In the long run, this will hurt the enthusiasm of the R&D team.

In view of the above problems, I mainly sorted out the norms of the cooperation process, developed a relatively reasonable and standardized product cooperation process, stipulated three rules with the product students, and clarified the standards and norms of PRD output. The business needs of operation were also unified by the product output, eliminating one-sentence demand. Unified standard process of collaboration with product, front end, UED and QA teams. There must be clear standards and specifications for downstream work output from upstream dependent parties. Oral words are invalid and cooperation is refused.

In the case of cross-team collaboration chaos, I particularly want to point out that the R&D department is not a business unit that directly generates revenue, but a service provider for the business unit. As a server, often standing in a passive and weak position, it is easy to be business people with the big stick of income to command you to obey unconditionally. Business department personnel randomly assigned tasks, arbitrarily change requirements, team students at a loss. In this way, no matter how reasonable the internal plan of the department is, it will be easily broken by external forces, which will make the team members at a loss what to do. As a result, they are not enthusiastic about work and like to shirk responsibility to each other. Over time, employees will have a sense of self-protection, where the work as far as possible back, where the responsibility as far as possible to push elsewhere, without merit but without fault.

To break the employees form the protection consciousness of the self sealing, encourage employees to do things more proactive, I can do is to shoulder all the responsibility on yourself, to coordinate each work, let the team members have no trouble back at home, let the team students believe I can do they worry about a thing, out of any problem I can come back, Create a relatively loose and free working space for your team and protect the team from external distractions.

Team management

People tend to overestimate themselves and underestimate others. Many managers feel that the work handed in by their subordinates is not perfect enough. They are careless here and wordy there. Most of the time, we are not as strong as we think. After fully understanding some management concepts, managers should constantly practice and collect feedback and iteration in actual management work, so as to form their own management style and find the most suitable management method for the current team.

As a team manager, there are usually two styles of management strategy, which can be summarized as centralized management style and decentralized management style.

Centralized management: the style of the manager is detail-oriented, clearly defining the work objectives and breaking them down in great detail so that the team under him can move forward step by step according to the whole plan. This is a style that is relatively centralized.

In the first year I led this team, I even participated in every requirement review, no matter how big or small the requirements were, and wrote codes with my FELLOW R&D students. I would conduct a detailed code review of the R&D team, personally lead the r&d team to conduct technical exchanges and sharing, and participate in technical discussions to confirm the architecture scheme. In this way, full trust has been established with everyone.

Delegating management: define the big goal, grasp the big direction, and make the key decisions. However, I did not go into every detail to control the execution details of my team and was result-oriented.

One year after I joined the team, the business process had been clearly established, and the key staff could fully understand and meet my requirements in business. Delegating authority at this time could fully mobilize the autonomy and creativity of the team. Most technical staff like to be led rather than managed.

There is no right or wrong management style, and it all depends on the team. In fact, I would like to talk about the decentralized management style. It is wrong to adopt decentralized management for a team that has just established a system, has not yet run smoothly, has incomplete team and has failed in the business ability of key staff. You must start from the first line of business details, hand in hand with employees, teach them how to do things correctly, how to meet your requirements, hand in hand to cultivate business backbone, build the core structure of the team.

I’ve seen too many cases over the years where management never really got into the business themselves and lacked a deep understanding of the business to get to the root of the problem. You always try to hire people to solve problems, you end up with a succession of people that never solve problems, and you never think deeply about trying to solve business problems yourself. Most of the time, the problems reflected by the architecture are actually organizational and process problems. In short, as the management, if they do not have the determination and courage to go deep into the front line to find problems and solve them by themselves, it will be difficult for the team to make new breakthroughs and succeed.

Team culture

In the first few years of my career, I heard some concepts about team culture and corporate culture, but I was not particularly impressed. Especially after I read the book “Built to Last”, I feel that for an enterprise, what determines the short term is skill, the medium term is strategy, and the long term is culture. Corporate culture is really important for a company, and team culture is also very important for a team. I also neglected the impact of team culture at the beginning of leading the team.

Lead the team in the beginning, I secretly to find some team students to do 1 on1 communication, I found the problem here is serious, a lot of people in order to avoid the fault punished, dare not to refactor optimize code, closed yourself into a small circle, also does not have too much pursuit and ideal, has no bottom elimination mechanism, do you think can continue to eat pot. At that time, the department was full of old people who had worked for many years. The old customs and habits had formed a very stubborn bad culture, and the work mood was greatly affected.

The old bad culture includes:

  • Not motivated to do things;

  • Never admit your mistakes, always find excuses to pass the buck, always someone else’s problem;

  • Seek no merit but seek no fault; Poor sense of responsibility, low self-requirements for work;

  • Like to haggle over work arrangements;

In a bad cultural atmosphere, excellent employees will be pushed out, the team has no centripetal force, and it is difficult to retain good talents, and the employee turnover rate will be very high. In my opinion, a very important indicator to measure whether a team’s cultural atmosphere is attractive is the turnover rate of new employees. If a team’s atmosphere is very good, new employees can quickly integrate into the team and the turnover rate is very low. If the team atmosphere is poor, the new employees will be confused and difficult to integrate into the team, and will often leave soon, with a very high turnover rate. In fact, failing to retain new employees is far more terrible than failing to retain old employees.

The next culture I want to foster in the team is:

  1. Honesty, openness, transparency;

  2. Get along equally, eliminate the sense of hierarchy;

  3. Relaxed working atmosphere and harmonious team relationship;

  4. Dare to bear, take the initiative to take responsibility;

  5. Make others successful and share.

On the team culture this topic is actually very extensive, can write a separate article out. Here I would like to talk about some of my personal views based on the above points of team culture.

The power of honesty

First of all, I think honesty is also a kind of value for a TL or a team member, which is very important for the development of a team. As a TL, LEADING a team, I think the most important thing is that TL must be honest. Only by being honest to the team can trust be formed between TL and the team, and only by forming trust with the team can a tacit team be formed.

Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric, said: What is trust? Trust arises when a leader is sincere and straightforward and does what he says he will do. It’s as simple as that. Why does honesty work? Very simple, because honesty has the power to simplify!

Honesty is the most basic requirement for managers. Only honesty can win the trust of the team. Show-off speeches and awards can’t really win the heart of the team. Honesty allows you to face your flaws, make targeted changes to yourself, solve your team’s problems, and foster a trusting team atmosphere.

I have seen a typical case. In daily work, the supervisor was not honest enough to the subordinate. In daily work communication between the subordinate and the supervisor, the subordinate did not do well enough, and the supervisor did not timely communicate and provide guidance. Think about it for a moment. I am the one who has been beaten with low performance, and I will not be convinced. Why didn’t you tell me in advance about the problem and let me correct it in advance? Be courageous with your subordinates and have the courage to point out their problems. Be courageous to criticize and manage employees who don’t perform well, such as why you were fired. These conversations and conflicts are often uncomfortable, and I admit it’s hard to talk about low performance every time, but you have to have the courage to be honest not only with those who are performing well, but also with those who are performing badly.

Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, was a man who was terrifyingly honest with himself and with others, brutally honest, with things as they really were. It’s true that honesty can make people uncomfortable at times, and Steve’s gruffly honesty is controversial, but I think if you’re a results-oriented person, you should try to be as honest as possible, or the end result could be far from your goal.

Allow your subordinates to challenge you

Secondly, I would like to talk about getting along equally and eliminating the sense of hierarchy. In my opinion, the most important thing is to make everyone feel that you are amiable and not a superior leader. For example, in many cases, you are not the only one to make decisions on some technical solutions in the team. Sometimes, you should be good at listening to the opinions of team members and allow them to challenge you.

In fact, the corporate culture that requires subordinates to obey is very common at home and abroad. This is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if the company has too many people with ideas and their ideas cannot be unified, and the overall strategy of the company is schizophrenic, it is basically not far from death. Therefore, the management unified the company’s strategy, and the front-line staff emphasized the mission must be achieved.

Domestic foreign company especially emphasize the obedience of subordinates, take this as an employee of the basic professional quality training, commonly used to explain the story is “carry a message to Garcia”, emphasize the supervisor to arrange a later, subordinates are not allowed to talk about any conditions, are not allowed to challenge his boss, must be unconditional obedience, overcome all difficulties to complete the task, To solve the problem of leadership. This kind of executive power makes the boss feel very comfortable, and the company management implementation is relatively easy.

Most managers prefer more obedient subordinates, believing them to be more useful. Superior mentality, will not lower the state of mind to listen to the opinions of subordinates, even if they are wrong will not admit mistakes, on the one hand, afraid of their own authority is challenged, and afraid to admit mistakes to subordinates, feel hard face. I am not a saint. As TL, I have made some mistakes. I have apologized to some students in private. Open your mind, do not need to care too much about other people’s opinions, these I think are indifferent little things.

I know from my own experience that it is harmful to blindly ask your subordinates to obey you. Allow them to challenge you.

If the subordinates are blindly required to obey without any refutation, the team members will be short of thinking and just follow the TL idea for a long time. When the subordinates do not recognize the work itself in their hearts and just finish the work out of professionalism, the results will be qualified at most and it is difficult to achieve excellence. At the same time, it will lead to the lack of work enthusiasm and initiative of subordinates, easy to form the habit of escaping responsibility.

On the contrary, I think as A TL, I must encourage my subordinates to think positively and proactively, so that they can set their own growth goals and have a sense of belonging and responsibility for work. Try to give subordinates more free space, do not set too much formalism constraints; Allow subordinates to challenge you, participate in your decisions, and even question your decisions. In this way, subordinates can increase the sense of belonging to the work, a stronger sense of responsibility, more proactive, self-driven.

When you make mistakes, subordinates can help you correct them. After all, the collective wisdom is higher than the individual. As the saying goes, “two heads are better than one.”

The owner of consciousness

“Owner consciousness” is mainly reflected in two levels: the first is a serious and responsible attitude, the second is a proactive spirit. Being serious and responsible is the bottom line of work, and being proactive is the higher requirement of “Owner consciousness”.

Selfishness is indeed human nature, not their own things, it is difficult to talk about responsibility, let alone initiative. Therefore, team management is to strive to cultivate everyone’s sense of responsibility and ownership. To achieve this, it is necessary to enhance the sense of participation of team members, let them know and understand the value and context of what they do, and constantly strengthen the sense of mission.

For example, the system and business scope can be assigned to the designated person according to the interests of team members, previous project experience and other factors, and the reward and punishment mechanism can be clearly defined. Communicate clearly that this piece of work is yours and will be prioritized for honors, promotions, raises, etc. Bad job. If something goes wrong, you’re responsible, and SO am I. If one day you see a team member taking care of their work like a child, then you’ve met your goal and they’re fully owner conscious.

Build a learning organization

Finally, I want to talk about the establishment of a learning-oriented organization. Team members should share their knowledge and ideas as much as possible, so that we can learn from each other and summarize scattered knowledge points in the learning process by sharing. How to establish talent echelon is actually to establish a learning organization, so that everyone can actively participate in learning and sharing. KPI sets a technology sharing and team contribution, and the team takes turns to share technology. On the one hand, everyone is asked to learn and study some cutting-edge technologies, especially some technical reserves that the team may use. If he can explain this technology clearly to everyone, then he really has mastered it. It also allows others to learn about the technology and practice their speech and eloquence.

Encourage team members to share, be willing to share, open mind to achieve others. When training and sharing are maintained and a learning culture is formed, you will find that the technical ability of the whole R&D team will be improved at an amazing rate without taking too much extra time. When you hire a new junior employee, he or she can improve quickly in this environment and usually reaches a very good level in about six months.

Of course, the team may not have such awareness at the beginning, so you, as the manager, need to force it, put the requirements into KPI, and evaluate them seriously. Gradually, the team will form such an atmosphere and culture. Of course, to establish such a learning-oriented organization, we can also set up some reading sharing meetings to share the feelings of some books we have read. Another point is that the team’s wiki knowledge base must be set up, so that the team members can accumulate some daily technical solutions, project summaries and fault summaries through documents.

Communication and guidance

According to a report by Princeton University in the US, communication accounts for 75 percent of all factors that affect work. And 80% of the problems in our work are caused by improper communication, so we can see the importance of communication. Most of the time, we just want to express our own point of view, only focus on what we want to say, we try to use beautiful PPT, beautiful language, a lot of data, even quotations, without caring about whether others understand, whether they want to hear, whether they understand.

Communication is so ubiquitous in our work that you’ll find, especially in the tech world, that the percentage of people who can effectively communicate is even smaller. Communication is usually divided into downward communication (with subordinates), horizontal communication (with cross-team communication) and upward communication (with boss) according to the types of communication objects. Next, we will only discuss how to communicate with subordinates. The most effective way of communication is one-to-one communication.

One-to-one communication, also known as one-to-one meeting or one-to-one, is a common communication method used by Internet companies. One-on-one communication is widely used but rarely written, so I recommend the grove’s First Lesson for Managers and The Hard Way to Start a Business: How to Do Harder Than Hard Things, both of which have more on one-on-one communication. Grove is the president of Intel, one of my favorite CEOS, who led Intel’s transition from semiconductor memory to microprocessors. Ben Horowitz, author of “Starting A Business is Hard,” is a top Silicon Valley VC who has invested in Facebook, Twitter and other companies.

In “Grove’s First Lesson for Managers,” Grove describes one-on-one communication as follows:

At Intel, one-on-one meetings are usually held by managers with their subordinates, which is the main way to maintain a relationship of affiliation. The main purpose of one-on-one meetings is to exchange information and learn from each other. By discussing specific issues, the boss can transfer skills and experience to the subordinate and suggest ways to approach the problem. And subordinates can report any problems they encounter at work.

In my opinion, most students in technology r&d are introverted and do not easily express their inner thoughts to others. The meaning of one-to-one communication is that information can be transmitted from the bottom up, and at the same time, some questions, thoughts, opinions, problems, plans and so on can be communicated with managers, so as to obtain information that is not easy to obtain from other channels and ensure transparency.

1on1 communication what to talk about

There is a section on one-on-one communication (1ON1) in the book “Starting a Business is Hard: How to Do Things Harder than Hard”, and I give some advice on what to talk about. As A TL, I usually talk to the team about the following topics:

  1. Do you feel undervalued or undervalued? Why is that?

  2. Do you think you can learn something on the job? What have you learned recently? What other areas would you like to study?

  3. In the recent period of time, what are you satisfied with or dissatisfied with?

  4. What puzzles do you have in your current job? How can I help you?

  5. Some expectations and suggestions for the team and myself.

  6. What are you least clear about in terms of your company’s strategy and goals?

It is difficult to find other channels to effectively address these issues except in one-to-one communication. Through these 1on1 communication, I can really get a lot of feedback information, and some of the information I get even surprised me. I didn’t do well in these details. One-on-one communication creates a channel, from the bottom up, through which all of the above can be heard and resolved.

Some points of 1ON1 communication

★ Find a private place

Find an empty conference room or a corner where others can’t hear the conversation. Do not talk in a workstation or noisy environment, because only in a private environment can you reduce the psychological pressure of some words being heard by others in communication, and then you can express yourself more easily and truly.

★ It is best to inform 1ON1 team members in advance

Generally, team members need to be informed of the topic and specific time of 1ON1 communication one week in advance. The advantage of this is that team members can prepare the content of the next conversation in advance, because temporary communication is easy to occur due to human memory problems, resulting in some questions they want to talk about at that time.

★ Regular

In His book Starting a Business Is Hard, Ben Horowitz argues that one-on-one communication needs to be guaranteed at least once a month. Grove, on the other hand, believes in varying degrees of control depending on subordinates’ familiarity with the job.

In addition, Grove believes that the speed at which things change is also a factor in the frequency of one-on-one communication. As a technical R&D department, I usually conduct 1ON1 communication in January or February.

Listen and act

To communicate effectively, it is necessary to listen attentively and keep sincerity, otherwise it is impossible for employees to put forward the problems in their minds.

Being sincere requires not answering questions, no matter how sharp, from any member of the team. If you don’t know how to solve the problem, discuss it with your team and see if you can find a solution together. Do not speak empty words and formulas, once the team members find this is an ineffective communication channel, the “bottom-up” channel will be closed.

★ Appropriate guidance

Not every employee understands the importance of one-on-one communication, and not every employee is able to talk about problems and ask for help. Many programmers are introverted, and some are not even good at expressing themselves.

Therefore, although the employee is the “protagonist” of one-to-one communication, the boss also needs to conduct appropriate guidance. For the boss has found the difficulties in the employee’s work, can take the initiative to bring them up properly, so as to better discuss, which will also let the employee feel very considerate.

Hiring and firing

For a team, talent is the most core, the key. Hiring and firing can be particularly challenging for a new TL, and we will focus on these two topics.

recruitment

Hiring often depends on what kind of person a company needs to hire at what stage of development. In the early days, when it is unlikely to recruit a full complement of experts, survival is more important than anything else. Attitude and taste are important. Depending on the alignment of business, technology, and organization, you may need to bring in people who can bring in new ideas after rapid growth. At this time, it is necessary to have high skills and good attitude and habits.

In front of the building technical team recruitment, must first clear the type of build team, in general there are three different types of technical team, the project driven, business driven, and technology driven, different types of technical teams also are very different in the recruitment, such as technology driven team you may need to be a very deep foundation in middleware, language and diligent person, Business-driven teams may need people with business sense and good technical and business architecture skills.

In the recruitment process, I also took a detour. At the beginning, I paid more attention to candidates’ background, language skills, architectural ability, operation and maintenance, and database, hoping to recruit a full stack of technical talents. Later, I found that I neglected the communication and collaboration ability and attitude, which is very important. As a result, although the new employee is good at technology, he likes to work behind closed doors and does not like to communicate with others. His teamwork ability is not good enough, and the overall output and efficiency are not high. Therefore, in the process of recruiting new recruits, we should not only focus on the candidates’ experience, framework and other technical aspects, but also pay attention to their comprehensive quality. A candidate with good leadership can integrate into the team quickly and learn some knowledge quickly.

★ Recruitment steps:

1. Make recruitment plans according to team building objectives

Recruit suitable talents according to the team’s own positioning. There are a few points need special attention TL, as TL are responsible for the growth of the candidates, avoid by all means are positioned, and by individual projects and hiring, such as front-end recruited the backend development team, engineering team recruitment algorithm, since this may lead to candidates came in is hard to get into the team, no feeling, down for a long time can lead to a new departure.

2. Identify recruitment needs (Position and responsibility) : List the responsibilities, skills and other requirements of each position.

Hiring needs ultimately come down to what kind of person is needed to match the overall business and organizational development.

3. Make proper use of recruitment channels

From my own experience, most talent recruitment channels are more reliable through Internet recruitment channels and recommendation from friends. For high-level talents, headhunting can be used to target people.

★ Talent selection:

As a technical interviewer, the selection of talents is also a very important and key link. We should select the right talents according to the goals of our team, set the deadline for completion, and focus on professional skills, management ability, values (recognized by the company) and other aspects of the interview. The general requirements are as follows:

  1. Highly matched with the professional skills required by the post: professional technical skills interview pass, set post and responsibility;

  2. Strong communication skills: understand the business of the company, know the management, understand the development direction of the company;

  3. Responsibility: everything is explained, every piece has a landing, everything has an echo;

  4. Reliable and positive energy: don’t complain, take the initiative to solve problems, understand the importance of discipline, keep your word;

  5. Value identification: identify with the company, have goals and ideals, passion and momentum;

  6. Background checks: A very useful way to significantly reduce the risk of hiring a candidate. It’s always worth the hassle.

In addition, I would like to say that technical interviewers need to have some ability to identify talents and consciously improve their ability in this respect. I offer the following suggestions to technical interviewers:

  1. If you have some hesitation and confusion about the candidate, please give up this candidate, the problem you are most worried about is often very likely to happen.

  2. It is necessary to make clear the criteria for our recruitment of candidates, such as back-end JAVA research and development: JAVA foundation and distributed domain knowledge and skills evaluation. Less memorization questions and too theoretical questions are asked, and more valuable judgments about candidates are extracted from their practical experience.

  3. On the one hand, it is very important to ensure objectivity and fairness. The following intersection and final aspect often refer to the previous evaluation feedback. Today, we are not only selecting talents for our team, but also for the company. From a psychological point of view, it is necessary to cross interview, and the feedback given by the cross interviewer is often objective and pertinent, and the evaluation of the cross interviewer is given priority to.

  4. Interviewers do not take their own good at things to inspect the candidate, need to carefully look at the candidate’s resume, from the candidate’s experience to investigate the comprehensive ability of this person.

For the healthy development of a team, the most important thing is the core technical personnel, so the recruitment must be cautious. Once someone joins the team, it is equal to getting on a ship, and the entanglements, pains and joys must be faced together. The cost of recruiting the wrong person is more than just salary. So please be sure to let go of those experienced, qualified but very hesitant to match, landing into the interview, most of the end is painful for each other.

As a TECHNICAL TL, the most successful thing is to recruit people who are better than you. You do not need to worry about whether you will be replaced or not. First, you should make achievements for yourself and the team. Second, inclusiveness and diversity should be developed. Liu Bang made good use of the three great scholars of the early Han Dynasty, but his individual ability was not as good as Han Xin and Zhang Liang. The TL does not measure recruitment by its own strengths and weaknesses, but by looking at gaps and development items in the team skills view.

fire

Firings are often more about employees who violate the company’s culture, guidelines, or consistently fail to keep up. There is also a local saying in Ali: “If you have not fired or dismissed an employee, you are not really a qualified manager.” Most technical managers are easy-going and do not like to fire employees.

However, employees who violate the red line or can’t keep up with the pace, especially those who do not recognize the values of the team, will affect other students in the team with some negative emotions and behaviors. Therefore, it is necessary to make a decision and take appropriate measures to let employees leave immediately. Of course, if it’s just employees who can’t keep up with their abilities, you can also recommend suitable positions to other companies, so that the brothers who fought together with you can have a good home, and the employees will feel warm. On the whole, “mercy is not the best soldier”. Senior managers should not hesitate too much in firing people. It is more than worth the loss for one or two people to affect the morale of the whole team.

Most Internet companies have corresponding KPI assessment for technical personnel, and those who fail to meet expectations will be eliminated. I believe that human nature is good. As a TECHNICAL TL, I don’t want to expose my team members, myself included, to this challenge.

As a company grows, the organization must upgrade, and the turnover of new and old personnel is normal. If a team member’s performance is not up to expectation and he is not informed through KPI assessment mechanism, he may not be aware of his own problems and will never grow up. Compared with short-term economic returns, personal growth is more important. There is a local saying in Ali that “a life without 3.25 is not a perfect Ali journey”. When you are in the low point of development, experiencing the assessment result of the last place may make him completely awake, realize his shortcomings, and completely stimulate his potential, so that he can bounce back from the bottom.

In psychology, there is a famous Dunning-Kruger effect, also known as the Darke effect. The idea is that it’s very easy to have a cognitive bias about yourself, which, at its simplest, means that you overestimate yourself. The graph of the Darke effect:

As is reflected in the picture above, most people are actually at the peak of ignorance. To grow into a wise man and a master, one must first fall from the top of ignorance to the valley of despair, and then climb up to accumulate knowledge and experience to become a wise man and a master. An important responsibility of the responsible manager is to push his subordinates from the top of ignorance to the valley of despair, and the climb to enlightenment depends on personal fate.

A qualified technical TL must create a valley of despair for the team member, and also show him a slope of enlightenment, so that the employee will constantly breakthrough themselves. Bear as a manager, we should not be the role of a good man, also want to have a ruthless side, ali also has the phrase “to be kind heart, knife faster”, when the team in some not meet the requirements of the team, the manager should take the initiative to pull him, if you try many times, finally reach expected, should ask him to leave. Because in the middle of the process, to be brutally eliminated, no matter to the organization, or to the individual, the loss is greater.

Every developer has his or her own ideal technology manager. What do you think are the characteristics of a good TL? Welcome to discuss in the comments area and share with you.

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