I’m only half joking. Hopefully your company is ‘one of the good ones’ and it will work out, but they are few and far between.
The tech lead job varies a ton from one company to the next, but all too often it comes with high expectations without enough autonomy or authority to deliver on them. Make sure your boss provides clear expectations and work with them to clarify boundaries over time. I’ve been on both sides of this process and it is difficult and necessary.
Too often, tech leads are expected to wear more hats than they are able to wear well. Delegate all that you can and if there is still too much work to do, ask for help.
It’s all about communication so actively work on this skill.
But the companies in the metropolis either have to pay good wages relative to the metropolis or hire remote. This won't really be a problem until/unless we hit a tipping point in the number of companies hiring remote and I predict that will take decades (unless something drastic happens).
Pro rata [1] is pretty standard [edit: at least in early stage startups], so investors typically have the option to maintain their level of ownership by putting money into the round. Everyone else gets diluted. I think in practice investors only get diluted if they actually want to. I'm not sure how often pro rata is extended to founders, but I would guess it's pretty common.
Keep in mind that IH'ers are trying to start their own independent internet-based bootstrapped businesses. Having joined the IH community recently, I can attest that the business side of things is where most IH'ers are lacking in terms of achieving that goal (myself included). Their technical skills tend to be "good enough". Hence the value placed on these types of books. Hope that helps to explain.
I'm glad you wrote this article because I think people should put themselves out there more (myself included). By doing so, you open yourself up to feedback, both positive and negative, that can help you improve. You have a good example of this with your 9/29 update.
In the spirit of constructive criticism, I second the "not really good testing" feedback, mostly due to the lack of tuning effort and omission of performance-affecting details like configuration, the wire protocols used, how data is being serialized/deserializaed, etc. (though I am no expert with these technologies so some of this may have been implied). All of that may have been overkill for what you were trying to do, but it's what people look for in benchmarking / "good testing". I hope this helps.
I applied at Toptal recently, but withdrew my application when I heard about how the CEO is hoarding equity that was promised to investors and the co-founder. Now they are suing the co-founder as well (and disputing that he is actually a co-founder). (He seems to be within his legal rights, but ethics is another matter entirely.) https://www.theinformation.com/articles/at-booming-toptal-no...
I'd suggest looking at Facet (facetdev.com) or Arc.dev as alternatives.