Re:Similar Situation (Score 1)

@ jomama717 I used to be in your situation too - very little time to code, and responsible for a team.

The single biggest improvement to my life at work as a technical team leader came about when I learned to better delegate. You have an entire team at your disposal! They are there to help you, as well as each other! It's all to easy to slip into 'control freak hero' mode, where you feel the need to do everything yourself because you don't feel anybody else can do it... but that will only ever perpetuate the situation and never give less experienced developers the chance to learn the ropes and be able to do what you can do. And if they don't get better at what they do, then they can never help take some of your workload off you.

In other words, If you don't feel you can delegate because you believe that others won't do the work to your standards, then you need to start fixing that, by making time to coach them through tasks and give feedback. If there are already developers on your team that you do trust to complete tasks to your standards, then you must delegate more immediately!

If you sub-divide and delegate a number of tasks between 4 or 5 developers (and yes, sometimes these are non-coding tasks, just like yours), then what might be a small effort or trivial interruption for them, can be a major load off your stack. It all adds up.

This would allow you more time to code up some solutions or example code as a technical lead (which are folded back into the team projects, again helping the team be more successful), or coach individual developers to bring them up to your required standards (if you don't feel you can delegate to them yet) - everybody wins; it's a virtuous circle.

If you feel you are struggling under the weight of non-coding tasks, again it's worth stressing that you can give out non-coding tasks too - say you need to write a document guideline for a web service API, there's nothing stopping you delegating that, to another developer, even if it's not coding work. Send a team member to a client meeting to gather feedback, and ask them to summarise the feedback for you. If it doesn't work out the first time, try and understand why and fix it.

If you aren't doing this already, then you should give that a go for six months. After that time, if it doesn't work for you, then...

Become an independent software contractor - where you will be paid to focus on code, because that is specifically what you will be hired to do. You get to work with a great variety of teams and codebases, learning much more than you would at a single company.

You can better set and negotiate your wage (within reason) and there's also no more performance reviews, unnecessary meetings (time is money), much less politics to endure as a 'non-employee', and at the end of a contract period you can give yourself a few weeks off to travel or recharge at home when, as you want it (Yes, you can give yourself 6 weeks annual leave to de-stress if you wish, and nobody can deny you that privilege).