I’m a senior dev currently interviewing for a team lead position at a startup. While I consider myself highly technical, the things that frustrate me the most day-to-day are teamwork related. Lack of trust. Teammates who don’t want to talk to each other. Other seniors getting away with subpar work. Lack of clear team purpose and product vision. Lack of buy in on common engineering practices.
As a people manager these issues I care so much about would be within my sphere of influence and responsibility. For better or worse.
I felt this - a lot of the problems I've experienced with teams before could have been solved by the management.
In practise now I find that I am a Team Lead and yet I have far less ability to influence things than I thought. There are a host of people including my boss who want to run everything and expect me to be a rubber stamp.
In fact I get into shit more because I have to speak up for people in the team who are (unfortunately) rightly afraid to. Like "for a story to be ready we need the API defined" - how can QA work in parallel on automated tests when they don't know what to test? Scrum masters, POs, my manager, architects......they just talk whichever shit suits them today as if it was all self evident truth and tomorrow they're moaning about why the tests are late.
Basically you get into the politics of who is to blame for the state of affairs and the people who chose those directions and strategies are well connected and good at shifting blame.
I don’t fully agree with all points but there are many words of caution to be spoken about the expectation that by moving to a manager role you get more agency on the things that frustrate you as a sw eng. “The managers path” is a good resource to expand on that. https://www.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Grow...
As a people manager these issues I care so much about would be within my sphere of influence and responsibility. For better or worse.