This post is part of my Tech Lead Series, a collection of practical advice for engineers stepping into leadership roles.
A former colleague spent eight years as a tech lead. Same level, different teams. He was good at the job: respected by his teams, trusted by stakeholders, reliable. But when he started looking for his next role, he found that his skills hadn’t grown much in five years. He’d become very good at a job that no longer challenged him.
He’d fallen into the tech lead trap.
The trap is subtle. The role is comfortable. You’re competent. People appreciate your work. There’s no obvious crisis forcing change. But beneath the surface, you’ve stopped growing. The job that once stretched you now fits too well.
How the trap works
The tech lead role has a natural ceiling. Once you’ve mastered the basics, the work becomes routine. You know how to run 1:1s. You know how to push back on scope. You know how to balance coding and leading. The challenges that used to require growth now just require execution.
This happens for several reasons.
Your influence is locally bounded. It extends to your team and maybe some adjacent ones. Problems that require broader influence don’t come to you. You solve the same scale of problems year after year.
A well-running team doesn’t need heroics. When things are going well, there’s less pressure to change anything. The reward for doing the job well is doing the same job again.
And when work is comfortable, you stop seeking discomfort. But growth happens at the edge of your abilities, not in the middle.
The stagnation is invisible too. Your manager sees a reliable performer. Your team sees a steady leader. From the outside, everything looks fine. Sometimes you’re the last person to notice.
Signs you’re trapped
Some signals that suggest you’ve stopped growing:
When did you last struggle with something new? If every problem feels like a variation on something you’ve solved before, you’re not being challenged.
You can do the job on autopilot. Meetings, decisions, and reviews all run on muscle memory. You’re executing, not thinking.
You’ve stopped being curious about new technologies, about how other teams work, about problems outside your domain. Curiosity fades when everything feels familiar.
Your conversations haven’t changed. The same stakeholder issues, the same team dynamics, the same technical debates. Nothing new enters the picture.
Ask yourself: what have I learned this year that I didn’t know last year? If you can’t answer, you probably haven’t grown.
And if you’re waiting for something to change, hoping for a promotion or a new project or a different manager, that’s a sign you’ve given up on creating change yourself.
Getting out
Escaping the trap requires intentional action. Comfort is self-reinforcing, and you won’t drift out of it.
Volunteer for initiatives outside your usual scope. Cross-functional projects, new domains, problems nobody owns. Unfamiliar territory is where the learning happens.
Start contributing beyond your team. Help other tech leads, mentor engineers in other groups, take on org-wide technical initiatives. The skills you’ve built have broader applications than you think.
Write about what you’re learning. Present to your team or company. Teaching forces you to deepen your understanding and exposes gaps in your knowledge.
Figure out what you’re avoiding because it’s uncomfortable. Public speaking? System design? Strategic thinking? Go toward it.
Ask people you trust where your blind spots are. What should you be better at? What’s holding you back from the next level? Listen to the answers.
And sometimes the trap is the role itself. If you’ve genuinely maxed out growth opportunities where you are, moving to a new team, new company, or new role might be the right answer.
The fork in the road
Most tech leads eventually face a choice: engineering management or the technical track.
Engineering management means moving toward people leadership. Less code, more 1:1s, more organisational thinking. You become responsible for teams, not systems. The tech lead role is partial preparation, but management requires new skills: hiring, performance management, navigating organisational politics.
The technical track means moving toward Staff or Principal engineer roles. Deeper technical influence, broader architectural scope, less direct people responsibility. You’re still leading, but through technical contribution rather than team management.
Both are valid paths. Neither is a promotion from tech lead; they’re different jobs. The trap often comes from not choosing either, staying in the middle ground where you’re doing some of both but not progressing in either.
Think honestly about which path fits you. Some tech leads love the people side and should go toward management. Some love the technical side and should grow into Staff roles. Some discover they want something else entirely.
Staying sharp in the role
Maybe you’re not ready to leave. Maybe you like being a tech lead and want to stay. You can still avoid the trap.
Different teams have different challenges. Rotating to a new team resets your learning curve and exposes you to new problems.
Volunteer for the struggling team, the complex domain, the critical project. Comfort comes from predictability, and the hardest teams teach you the most.
Identify something you want to get better at and pursue it with intent. Take courses, find mentors, put in deliberate practice.
Set growth goals alongside your delivery goals. What skill will you have in a year that you don’t have now? What will you understand that you don’t understand today?
Don’t wait for performance reviews to get feedback. Ask colleagues what you could do better. Seek out honest assessments of your work.
The honest question
The question to ask yourself: am I still growing?
Performance can continue long after growth stops. Comfort can coexist with stagnation. So the question isn’t whether you’re still good at your job. It’s whether you’re still getting better.
Are you learning? Are you being challenged? Are you better this year than last year? Will you be better next year than this year?
If the answer is no, you’re in the trap. And the only way out is to acknowledge it and do something different.
My colleague who spent eight years at the same level eventually moved to a Staff engineer role at a different company. The transition was hard. He’d atrophied in ways he hadn’t noticed. But within a year, he was learning again, challenged again, growing again.
The trap isn’t permanent. But escaping it requires you to notice you’re in it.
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