Tyler Wilson

Tyler is a Lead Full-Stack Engineer here at Leadr. 

Tyler has always had an interest in technology. Even as a kid, he was taking apart computers and printers and reassembling them just out of curiosity of how it worked. Right out of high school, he started web development doing front-end development, but that quickly expanded into full-stack experience. The curiosity and draw of how things work still motivates him today to learn new technologies and take on new challenges.

Outside of work, Tyler has what some would consider to be “too many” hobbies. Between collecting comic books, playing video/board games, reading books, cooking, and gardening, his mind is always occupied by something. Even with all of that, though, he still finds plenty of time to spend with his wife, Casey.

Why I'm Passionate About Leadr

At Leadr, we all have a story of a poor management experience that led to our passion for people development and desire to work at Leadr. We call these our Nigel stories.

Nigel is a fictitious character we’ve worked with or for in the past with unhealthy leadership tendencies. We all have those tendencies within ourselves, and they can emerge unintentionally, impacting those around us. 

We are all Nigels, or know a Nigel, and Nigel is why Leadr exists. Here’s Tyler’s Nigel story. What's yours?

I want to tell you about the journey of “Sarah”. Sarah was a front-end developer that I worked with. I was asked to interview her for a React developer position. Through this, I got to learn a bit about her past. She had worked at a couple different companies doing contract-based work, all of which used React. This spanned a time period of about 2-3 years right after she finished college. She was able to demonstrate that passion needed and the drive to continue learning new technologies and to stay up to date on the latest technologies related to her craft. It wasn’t just that, though that led me to suggesting we hire her. She also had the knowledge and understanding of how to break down the front-end components and how to make them reusable, which is something I valued greatly and that we were sorely lacking at the company.

About a month later, I got the email that she had been hired to the company in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. She never had the opportunity to meet those she would be working with in person, and had to rely solely on virtual meetings and conversations to accomplish the job she was hired to do. This was not an easy task, as there was a lot she needed to learn in order to get up to speed and start making meaningful contributions. So what happened? She was dropped on a team that just had a huge shift in developers leaving her as the only front-end developer on that team. She had to learn the code and the architecture on her own. She also had to learn the ins and outs of the client she was working with as well to understand what it was she was working on in the first place. This left very little time to go over internal processes and what her day-to-day job would look like. 

This project was led by one of the C-suite managers at the company, so he had a very busy schedule as well. I received a message from the CEO of the company that this other manager was having issues with Sarah and could not understand why she was not able to complete the work she was assigned, so I was being asked to meet with her. This was a reasonable ask since I was the one who recommended hiring her but also because I worked with her as a fellow front-end engineer with React experience. When I started talking to her, I explained what I was hearing, clarified that I was on her side and wanted to fix what was causing the root issue. She started crying at this point. As she was explaining her perspective on the situation, there was one clear issue. Communication was non-existent, and not necessarily on her part. 

She would ask other developers to help, nothing happened. She was being confronted about why she was only logging 4-5 hours of work on her tickets each day, it was because the other 3 were spent in meetings trying to get others up to speed and was never told that she should be logging that time as well. Management seemed to always treat it like a “her” problem and not a “us” problem. That all said, there was a survey that went out asking us to rate our enjoyment level of the job. After reaching out to her, it was no surprise that she was miserable.

Imagine how this could have been different if the managers took the time to properly communicate. Imagine if there was a way that Sarah could have given honest feedback about the situation. Imagine if there was a bit of accountability around the communications between Sarah and her managers. Had they been using Leadr, her experience would have been the complete opposite of “miserable.”