Conscious Decisions and Aspects of Technical Leadership with Tad Reeves (3/3)

Technical managers are responsible for developing great engineers, right? Yes, but that is only part of the job. Technical managers should also be developing leaders on their team. But how exactly do you do that? It starts with delegating some leadership responsibility when you delegate work.

Tad Reeves, our guest in episode 298, returns to share his experience as a blogger, the progression from engineer to architect, and thoughts on being a technical manager. You’ll hear how Tad has made conscious decisions to take on or avoid certain types of job roles (consulting, people management, etc.) over time based on life circumstances outside of work.

Original Recording Date: 09-12-2024

Tad Reeves is a principal architect for Arbory Digital. If you missed part 1 or part 2 of our discussion with Tad, be sure to check out Episode 296 and Episode 297.

Topics – LinkedIn and an Emphasis on Technical Writing, Architects and Interview Questions, The Role of Technical Manager, Developing Leaders and Stepping Away from Leadership, Parting Thoughts

2:56 – LinkedIn and an Emphasis on Technical Writing

• Tad mentions he sees people every so often who question the value of being on LinkedIn. Ever since his job at AARP, all of Tad’s future roles (contract and full-time roles alike) have been a result of passive recruitment through LinkedIn.
  • Tad says his resume is what’s on LinkedIn. This is a great data point for all of us to consider (i.e. whether we are on LinkedIn and have our accomplishments listed).
  • “There’s also a reason to be civil and always present the face that you want other people to see on LinkedIn because you never know. Almost certainly, somebody who’s going to hire you is going to be seeing you. If you have a proclivity for political rantings or something like that you should probably take that somewhere else. There are other, better places that aren’t going to affect your career.” – Tad Reeves
• What was Tad’s motivation for leveraging his writing and presentation skills more as he gained experience?
  • Tad mentions he had been blogging for a while because it was interesting but originally began writing the articles for himself.
  • “Google is better than the Confluence search engine anyway. I’m just going to write it on my own blog, and I’ll find it later.” – Tad Reeves, on getting into blogging
  • Tad did not realize it at the time, but his articles were becoming popular. At Tad’s first Adobe Summit (a yearly conference focused on marketing technology), multiple people recognized him and thanked him for the helpful blog articles.
  • Many of Tad’s articles were about infrastructure, CI / CD pipelines and blue green deployments, and various other technical topics. Some articles even included diagrams Tad designed himself.
  • Tad started to understand the visitors to his site were real people that he could impact in a positive way. And for him, that was fun and exciting. He could impact both direct customers and other engineers, which has also brought Tad new work over time.
  • Many times, the thing that has brought Tad more work is writing “a bunch of helpful stuff.” He stresses the importance of considering the audience we are writing for as well.
  • “Would this help somebody else do something? Is it giving away some of my secret sauce? I don’t know. Maybe. But, is it going to help somebody? Probably.” – Tad Reeves
  • The articles became evidence of technical competence that could