How to sit timlid

Friday is the most suitable day to finally overthrow the power of his team lead . He will never decide to quit of his own free will, because this is not a job, but a fairy tale. He needs to be broken and not leave him another choice. Let's figure out how to make it so that he came to this thought on his own!

1. It is well known that every developer has an impostor syndrome, which, of course, is justified. The Timlids have it even stronger - you from the impostor-developer have become an impostor-manager. Timlid is already teetering on the verge between working capacity and the abyss of madness, use it!
2. Ask him open-ended questions about recent changes in technology. Well, for example, “What did you like about Swift 5.1 updates?” Catch on attempts to evade and take the impostor to clean water - let him panic and exchange the night's sleep for a convulsive reading of all the news.
3. Ask him to add you to all his codebooks on the pretext that you want to learn from the best. Pullrekvest is likely to be few, so at stand-ups loudly offer your help and hint that everyone in the team is expected to make the same contribution.
4. Be sure to point out errors in the code style. Feel free to replace more colleagues in the comments, everyone should see that Akella missed.
5. Not a single Timlid sees real value in his work, hit this point! At the stand-up, ask the team leader to tell him what he does at work. After his stories about meeting and moving puzzles around the board, repeat the question “Did you do something?”.
6. Tell us how you went to visit Avito’s office and saw fresh fruit there, in Yandex - afternoon tea, and in JetBrains - your barista. Ask when you will have something other than bagels without a poppy, and what will it do for that. Let him feel his personal responsibility and frustrate.
7. Encourage all colleagues to start interviewing to evaluate their value in the market. You can even drop suitable vacancies for them yourself. They will inevitably return with large offers and come with them to team lead - let him know that he is sitting on a powder keg.
8. Always bypass the timlid in the line in the canteen. The first approach to mining is alpha behavior. At the instinct level, the timlid will begin to feel beta-specimen, and beta cannot lead the pack.
9. Organize a hackathon and put together a team of colleagues. When the team leader asks why he was not invited, say that you did not need Excel and Exchange programmers.
10. If the team leader works hard to improve the processes in the team, tell him about the theory of constraints and let Goldratt read The Goal. Let him understand the futility of optimizations not in the bottleneck, which your team most likely is not.
11. And as soon as he understands the need for these optimizations and ceases to deal with them, start whining in retrospectives about the fact that everything is bad in the team and nothing changes. Cognitive dissonance is the best way to destroy the already shaken psyche.
12. On the next 1-1, ask, “Why is Vasya senior, but I do not?”. This question baffles almost any team lead. Most likely the team leader will begin to mumble something about influence and experience. Ask to translate these things into a specific list of requirements and how to evaluate them - it will break anyone.
13. And if you are already a senior, then ask what your career path looks like. Each team leader must deal with the growth and development of his employees, let this be his headache.
14. Ask all your colleagues about their salaries and make a summary plate. Then come to the team leader with a delegation and ask for an explanation of why it is different, and how he understood that Petya works 20,000 rubles better than Katya.
15. And generally discuss salaries more often. A good option is loud in the kitchen or near the cooler in the presence of timber.
16. Offer to introduce the practice of skip rallies in the team - this is when you meet 1-1 with the leader of your team lead. There is nothing better than a team leader eagerly trying to read the lips of a conversation in a transparent conversation room!
17. Start attending team lead meetings and conferences. The next day, tell the team leader about all the cool things you heard about there, preferably from big guys like Uber or Google. Let the timlid feel incompetent due to the lack of these practices.
18. Remember that the team leader himself was once a developer, dig out his commits three years ago and throw off a laugh in the general chat. Imposter Syndrome needs constant recharge.
19. If the team leader went on vacation, write him the message “When you get back, you need to talk ...”, or “I received another offer and I am serious.” You can’t let him relax on vacation, let him worry about losing his team instead of surfing.
20. Often throw off articles to him about the transition from managers to developers or burnout, adding to this "haha, it's good that I made the right choice."
21. Ask the team leader how your team affects the goals of the company and what benefits you bring. Preferably at a daily stand-up. If he turns away, then finish with a question about how this influence can be measured and understood that everything is not exactly the opposite.
22. Stop highlighting serious problems on team retrospectives, get by with stickers like “take more rest”, “rename statuses on the board” and “go to team building”. Let the team leader think that everything is fine in the team - this will allow problems to catch him by surprise!
23. Tell the timlid at the dining room that you envy his courage. If the developer leaves the company, then he will be able to find a new job in a couple of days. But the team lead from the outside, of course, will not be taken anywhere - and in general they are not in demand, and they will not prove their professional suitability.
24. Each team leader believes that he can write code. Ask him to do the simple task that the sprint’s goal depends on, and get ready to discuss in retrospect why the goal was not achieved.
25. Sabotage any attempts by the team leader to introduce new workflows with a quote from the agile manifesto "People and interaction are more important than processes and tools."
26. Invite a team leader to speak at a conference. Since he is no longer developing, he will not be able to talk about technologies, and all managerial practices have not changed since the time of Ancient Egypt.
27. The Timlids reassure themselves that their result is the result of the team. More often remind you that this is not so, and the team achieves everything on its own.
28. More often joke that your team leader is a useless layer, an effective manager and already irrevocably lost as a developer. He will laugh with you, but you will see hidden pain in his eyes.
29. Show less autonomy and independence and do not believe in all this bullshit about self-organizing teams. Let the team leader spend all his day on the micromanagement of each employee - this will help to drain all his vital energy from him.
30. Ask on the next 1-1 what the team leader enjoys in his work. Most likely, he will not answer anything - since it is physically impossible to enjoy such work.

And the moral behind all this is simple - love your work and become a team leader only if you can really answer the question from the last paragraph. Then none of these tips will work against you.



Initially, I started publishing this set of tips as a replenished Twitter thread . If you want to follow the continuation - do not forget to subscribe !