This past Friday marks the end of Unit 1 for DS10 and one month as a Team Lead (TL) for me. TL contracts are for 8 weeks (2 sprints) with the option of 2 additional sprints. When I applied I only gave myself a 20% chance of getting the job but I guess they must need the warm bodies so I was accepted. Since Lambda School offers full-time and part-time tracks TLs are needed for both. Students who become a TL for the opposite track type (e.g. full-time student becoming a part-time TL) will continue being a student while they work as a TL. People like me (full-time student who becomes a full-time TL) have their student status paused. In this blog I’ll give some thoughts after my first month.
For students from my cohort became TLs: 2 full-time and 2 part-time. When I was a student my TL told me that full-timers becoming part-time TLs was more “competitive” since they continue with their student status. Since I never actually planned on being a TL I applied for both part-time and full-time. Mainly I applied to get back into the swing of applying for jobs and dealing with the anxiety of doing so. There was supposed to be an interview for the position but there was none. Again, warm bodies. I assume I got the full-time position randomly but who knows.
Another thing my former TL told me was that there’d be a lot of downtime to work on my projects. Was I gaslighted? Quite possibly. One month down and I can say I haven’t made anywhere near the progress on the goals I set for myself while I was preparing to be a TL. And it’s not entirely due to laziness. I swear. My day starts officially at 10am local time but plenty of times East coast or Midwest students reach out for assistance before then. Then there’s about 60-90 minutes of work (3 hours on days I have to monitor slack). There’s an hour for lunch (usually less since lectures run long). Then from 2-7pm there are meeting with students 1:1 or in groups and generally providing assistance. After that sometimes students will need more help, sometimes I’ll work on my own projects but often times I just want to switch off. Not sure if I want to keep this pattern for another three months.
Which is not to say I don’t find value in the work. If I didn’t I could just quit. There’s definitely reward in helping students who want help and appreciate having gotten it. There’s some lack of clarity around how much “teaching” a TL is supposed to do and I may do too much but teaching is a good way to reinforce one’s own understanding. Some students don’t want to be bothered with the required meetings (and judging by performance it isn’t necessarily that they’re sufficiently advanced) and seem annoyed by them. Sometimes I wonder if they think I’m requiring the meetings rather than Lambda’s bureaucracy. No matter, I’m happy to wrap up quickly with those students and keep time spent to a minimum.
Lambda’s bureaucracy is probably to biggest downside to the job. Forms, forms, more forms. Hey, did you submit your forms? While the forms serve the purpose of tracking student and school success so many of them are poorly reasoned and redundant. While the team behind them, Student Success, says they’re open to suggestion for improvement I’ve yet to see any actual evidence of that. It’s this and other issues on the admin side which dampen my enthusiasm for for being a Team Lead beyond the first contract.