Or, why I love leading teams.
Before starting my job at WebDevStudios, I never considered being anything but a developer. I wanted to be hands on, coding, building websites. About a year after I started at WDS, I had the opportunity to be an interim lead for my team and I fell in love with the role.
At WDS, the lead engineer is responsible for making sure the engineers on their team are set up for success. There’s a more formal job description, but to me, this summarizes it perfectly. Sometimes it means being on multiple client update calls in a day, other times it means rubberducking (or both!). We even sometimes get our hands dirty in the code. I review code, help set my team’s goals along with a project manager, and do whatever I can to make sure that the team has everything it needs to build great websites.
Last year, my team worked on a project that, for a variety of reasons, necessitated us putting in longer hours and been incredibly focused. Despite the challenges, it was really gratifying to dig into a project and work together and it reminded me why I like this role so much.
As corny as this may sound, there’s an energy that I get from the flow of really good teamwork. When tickets are being worked on, reviewed, approved; when the team is communicating with each other and the client. I love seeing developers level up throughout a project both in hard skills and soft skills – seeing someone take ownership of feature that maybe they wouldn’t have previously, or writing more concise code.
It was a lot of packed days and things going on, but getting into the flow and feeling energized at the end of the day really makes it rewarding.