Let’s set the scene. It’s the summer of 2010. Kiln had been launched into the wild for all of six months, after a grueling year-long, no-revenue sprint to turn my dinky prototype that ran only on my personal laptop into a shipping application that worked both in Fog Creek’s hosted environment and in a gazillion ever-so-slightly-different on-site installations. We’d had all of a few months actually charging people, and were only just barely making a month-to-month profit, let alone having a positive ROI. We were thinking about What Would Come Next, and how to deliver That, and What Would It Look Like, because everyone knows that standing still is death. And me? I was enjoying coding every day to turn the vision in my head into something that our customers could actually use.

But then it happened. I came into work one day, and Ben Kamens, the head of the Kiln and FogBugz teams, called me into his office to tell me that he’d decided to leave Fog Creek and join the Khan Academy.

I felt sick. Tyler, who’d help found Kiln, felt sick. We left the office in a daze and had a lovely lunch that consisted mostly of beer, then came back and did a half-assed job pretending we were doing work for the rest of the day before we went home.

Part of our despair was personal, but a lot of it was professional. Here’s the thing: you may not know what your team lead does, but if they’re awesome the way Ben was, a huge number of problems get solved without you ever hearing about them, which frees you to work on actually shipping amazing products. So his leaving meant that:

1. No one would be shielding us from all of the problems peripheral to actually shipping new versions of Kiln; and
2. We were going to be making fewer, crappier releases as a result.

Of course, it wouldn’t actually come to that; one of us was going to learn how to become a team lead so that (provided we were good at it) we’d be able to continue to shield the rest of the team from all that stuff. At the end of the day, I stepped up and took the job.

Six months later I’d be at the end of my rope. I hated my job. I felt like I wasn’t accomplishing anything, I felt like I wasn’t competent at what I was doing, and my attitude deteriorated until my fiancée came home one night to find me physically ill from stress.

The thing is that I didn’t stink at my job. In fact, both my team and the rest of the company have told me that I’ve been a great team lead. The problem I was suffering from is that the only job I’d known at Fog Creek up to that point had nothing to do with the job I suddenly found myself thrown into.

We have a general cultural issue when it comes to coders. It has to do with career paths. Here’s how your typical coder career path works:

1. Hey, it looks like you can code! Why not try writing this feature over here? There’s the spec for it; just follow it and you’re golden.
2. Whoa, neat! You do a great job writing exactly what I tell you! Here’s a problem customers want solved; can you do that?
3. Awesome! That’s totally amazing. I heard you have an idea for something that’d be the bee’s knees, or at least one of its major joints; can you build it? Here’s a team who’ll work with you.
4. Insane! Congratulations! You are an amazing coder. You have founded a product that shipped and is in the black! You know what we should totally do with you?
5. Based on your long history of dealing with insanely complex technical issues, we’ve decided to make you a manager in charge of five to twenty people, because this is totally both the same skill-set and the same general area of interest as what you had before! Please as to enjoy with maximum intensity!

You spend years of your life focused on building things. Sometimes you have the idea, sometimes other people do. You like it better when you have the idea, because you “know” it’s the right thing, but the point at the end of the day is you build stuff. You build hard stuff sometimes that requires you to talk to and convince five, ten, fifteen, twenty developers that yours is the right way to go about things, which is definitely leadership and kind of looks managery, but you’re still down in the trenches writing code the whole time. Chances are pretty good hg churn and git log are gonna have your name there at least as much as anyone else’s.

Team leads are different. Your job, should you accept it, is to become what I’ve lovingly dubbed Shit Umbrella. Your goal is to find all of the peripheral stuff involved in getting the product out the door—important stuff, such as making sure the delivery schedule for the new servers makes sense for when you want to ship the product that needs them, or taking customer calls at 11 PM on a Sunday because their account quit working and they want to know why they should keep paying you, or figuring out when doing features the sales and support teams want makes financial sense—and then coming back and presenting a focused direction to all the developers so that they can get the features written without worrying about how they actually ship. You switch from doing the building yourself to enabling others to build stuff on your behalf.

I keenly remember sitting in our General Manager’s office, explaining how I just couldn’t do all of my job responsibilities, and him responding that I probably just wasn’t thinking about my job properly. We sat down and enumerated all of my responsibilities. We came up with five tasks, and then we ordered them by priority.

“Writing code” was priority number five of five. If I had anything I needed to do in one of the other four categories, that had to come first.

Once I accepted what I needed to do, I was both better at it and vastly more relaxed. As a developer, a good day is one where I land commits all day long, or hammer out a blog post that gets people talking, or solve a complex support case. As a team lead, a productive day might consist entirely of phone calls, one-on-ones, and emails that let the rest of your team get their stuff done. If you’re serving as a multiplier for your team’s productivity, then you’re being a great team lead. You need to redefine your success as helping others achieve success.

I learned a lot and became a pretty good Kiln Team Lead over the last couple of years, but several weeks ago, I came to the realization that it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing right now. I missed building things with my own hands, and I wasn’t really learning anything new about leadership, management, or the process of writing software.

At a lot companies, this is where you’d see me writing something like, “so I’ve decided to leave $COMPANY, take a sabbatical, and then join $OTHER_COMPANY to find new challenges.” At Fog Creek, that’s not how it works. Joel and Michael have a strong attitude that good developers should be rewarded as developers. When I went to them and told them that I wanted to get new experiences and get back into the writing part of writing software, they were really happy to make that happen.

So today? Coding is priority number one. Or occasionally two or three, but never five of five. I’m the senior-most developer on the Kiln team, and I’m back to writing code in that capacity. At the same time, to keep learning new things, I’m working both with a high school in Queens on their CS curriculum, and with an awesome TechStars company as a mentor providing leadership advice and technical guidance. I’ll hopefully have a few other announcements over the next several months as well.

If you like the sound of an environment that understands developers that way, you should come join me. Me? I’m right where I need to be right now.