Chapter 31. You’re the lead, not the know-it-all
One of the traps team leads encounter is the need to know it all. It doesn’t matter if you’re a team lead of 3 people or 30 people; you became a team lead because of your technical skill, right? That must mean you’re pretty smart, and you’re supposed to lead, right? You’re supposed to have lots of great ideas. You’re supposed to know lots of things. You’re supposed to be able to solve lots of problems. Well, that doesn’t mean you have to solve every problem yourself.
Many years ago, when I was a technical lead, I was also the project manager. We were a three-person project. I was the team lead, Andy was my junior person, and Mark was my mechanical engineer. We were working on a machine vision project back in the mid-1980s, when cameras were able to collect up to eight bits of data per pixel. That’s not megabits; that’s only eight bits.
Andy and I were working on the software for gauge inspection. Mark helped us by creating the gauge holder. Yes, it took three to implement this project. The gauges were similar to the gas gauges or mileage gauges in cars back in the ‘80s; they were orange lines against black backgrounds with other white markings at regular intervals. Our job was to detect the angle of the orange line on the gauge.