Yes tech lead in my experience is a BS non title invented to keep the most productive rank and file developers feel like their careers are going somewhere. It's extra responsibility and expectations with no additional empowerment
Exactly. Tech lead is the worst role I've had. It's like make believe manager, you get a bunch of extra supervisory work in addition to your regular work, but no actual authority to do anything about problems, other than stay late make up for the problems yourself.
You get bombarded by everyone outside your org who has a question vaguely related, and by your junior devs for anything they don't want to figure out themselves, and by your manager wanting to know whether we can release this half baked component X to some other team even though it will break production. You get maybe a little extra recognition but it's just not worth the 3x extra work.
