One thing I found from my experience as a team lead (and which is somewhat touched on in this article), is that sometimes, because team members never get a whiff of all of the deflected things that never reached them, the more critical will sometimes get the opinion that you're doing nothing at all other than acting as a pipe.
I vividly recall one incident where I passed along an urgent UAT issue to a self-styled "hot shot" developer, who responded (with cc's) that he was entirely too busy, and that "if I had two hands I could do it myself".. since I was "obviously not busy as I hadn't had many commits lately". Meanwhile, I was two hours into a client call negotiating turning functionality requests into deadline shifts, was simultaneously trying to triage a production issue to see if it was our problem or the client's problem, and had 50+ emails from developers and clients just from that day still un-responded to.. yeah, silent evidence is a bitch.
I do have to agree, however, that moving back to development released a lot of stress for me. It's far less stressful thinking about whether or not I can get something done as opposed to wondering whether 15 other people are going to be able to get something done..
Yes, and I didn't mean to be rude to any team leads, sorry if it came across that way.
In any role, it's important to communicate the work you're doing (ideally without bragging), up and down the hierarchy. That is hard for an umbrella to do but possible. ("Just checking folks - is anyone keen to fill in 5-min increment timesheets?" (Groans) "Thought not")
Also, changes in manager offer a natural opportunity to compare, since you can detect a difference in the kind of work the team receives.
Sorry, the muse for my post was to vent tangential memories that it recalled moreso than anything you said that seemed particularly rude or short-sighted :)
I vividly recall one incident where I passed along an urgent UAT issue to a self-styled "hot shot" developer, who responded (with cc's) that he was entirely too busy, and that "if I had two hands I could do it myself".. since I was "obviously not busy as I hadn't had many commits lately". Meanwhile, I was two hours into a client call negotiating turning functionality requests into deadline shifts, was simultaneously trying to triage a production issue to see if it was our problem or the client's problem, and had 50+ emails from developers and clients just from that day still un-responded to.. yeah, silent evidence is a bitch.
I do have to agree, however, that moving back to development released a lot of stress for me. It's far less stressful thinking about whether or not I can get something done as opposed to wondering whether 15 other people are going to be able to get something done..