I'm a Tech Lead, and nobody listens to me. What should I do?

This, many times this. If you encounter pushback from everywhere – leave, don’t spend your life energy fighting bullshit.

> Definitely got carried away. When coming to a new org, it's always good to learn the ropes a bit before fatiguing the team with more work, processes, and burdens.

This is probably the single, most important advice for any new person joining a company in a (technical) leadership position. There are going to be missing things in any org, and bad mistakes, and people needing to learn new things. But also there are going to be tons of decisions that make "no sense" on first look that do have a reason behind, and to fix that "root cause" you probably need a 3 years plan and buy-in from C-level. So, trust the team you are going to lead.

> hexagonal architecture

God help me. Was on a project where this was used to justify so much extra boilerplate. Every class had an interface, and then we used dependency injection to supply the class to something expecting that interface. Actually, it was in Rust, so there were no classes, but that didn't stop us. Absolute waste of time.

While I am not a software developer, it sounds like our career paths have had the same trajectory, and I'm wondering what the common factor is across industries.

I work in automation (mostly) as a lead tech and professional troubleshooter because I am familiar with a wide and varied amount of automation technologies. I've met plenty of people over the years who have much more advanced skills than myself, but never go beyond doing more than parts swapping on a workbench, which leaves me scratching my head.

Over the last few years, I have listened carefully to what people around me say about my work, and while it is good gas for the ego, I have notice that's not the likely reason I get promoted so quickly. While I can walk into a problem and know how to apply different processes to figure out what to do almost reflexively at this point, the real focus seems to be that I take ownership of the process.

Bit of a buzzphrase, "ownership of the process," but the short explanation is that a little planning, accountability, resourcefulness and communication seems to get you a lot further than just knowing what to do in any given situation. Employers like that because they now have department manager they can rely on, and team members like that because someone else is taking responsibility so they don't have to.

You're good at code, obviously, but if you zoom out on your work a bit, are you also bringing a bit of accountable authority to the table? That may be the real reason why you move up so quickly, or at least something that greases the gears so that can happen faster for you than, say, an equally skilled colleague.

I don't understand why that is a logical progression. Writing good code and leading a team needs vastly different skill-sets in my eyes.

I don't understand the point of your comment. Why did you switch companies?

As the other commenters stated, it is not clear what is the point. Writing good code and being a tech leader are very different positions with very different technical skills. I was a tech lead in a few cases (different companies or different departments of a very large company) and I was not the top developer there, my job was not to be one. I worked with developers that were much better than me that were not a good fit for a tech leader.

Big pile of horse shit, every word.

Wasted years in previous company under narcissistic manager with the same mindset. The guy had official senior lead title and was calling the shots. When ther team became too big, he assigned most senior people as “leads” without the official title. You had to perform as a team lead in an environment where your decisions do not have authoritative power, so every small task became negotiation with every member regardless of their seniority. Also no salary bump either. The “teams” quickly collapsed and they hired official team leads from there, with a real authority.

> Although hierarchical decision making may be more efficient, it's an unnatural system and anti-social

Where did you read this? “Empowerment management for empowered to empower #21”?

2c. is there a context I dont understand?

I think its important to note in most companies I worked in, the issues were mostly political.

But very useful. I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

I did a reverse image search on it, and it brought up 'vietname board game' and other war-themed images. Who thought it would be a good idea to have a corporate productivity diagram where the workers look like they're prisoners, there's shooting targets plastered all over, and the "coach" looks like a warden that's flashing danger signs (all the colors, and they choose red?). And that's not even including all the poor spacing, text formatting, color scheme, etc.

Honestly, the more I look at it, the worse it gets.

Same. Strong SAFe vibes. Hopefully I'll never have to 'work' in such a environment again.

That depends on the cultural / politics health of the group. The likeable right guy can end up stomped because he's a threat to the wrong dubious people. Seen this first hand in some companies.