Ask HN: I’m being asked to be a team lead with no additional salary. Accept it?

Hard to tell without knowing more. However generally NO!

It's similar to accepting a pay reduction.

You accept more responsibilities for no additional expense to the company. Rewarding them for bad behaviour.

It also signals a lack of commitment to the role and title.

There will be an undertone of "whatever .. that's just a title". And that will go both ways, you will feel like a "fake" team lead and they will treat you as "the developer with the fancy title that we blame when needed".

I guess the question should be. Do we get paid for our current replacement cost or the amount of work we do each day? Salaried jobs are treated differently than hourly jobs.

If we should get paid for value, your value arguably hasn’t changed yet as you take on this new responsibility. After you’ve done it for a while, yeah, you are now more valuable because of your new experience, skills, confidence gained, etc. But you don’t have those yet. So, maybe they are giving you an opportunity to build up equity in yourself and the cost to you is more work.

That’s one angle. But the other is that you are doing more work and maybe working more hours. If this is truly just more hours each day and not a slight shift in priority, then maybe it makes sense to at least have the conversation with them.

If I were you, I’d probably do the job first, do it well for 6 months and then have the discussion. Asking for money up front may be a little aggressive. But others may do differently and that is very important. Do what is comfortable for you. My sister is aggressive and talks to boss about salary all the time and she’s now making a lot of money.

In my experience being offered team lead with no increase in pay translated directly into additional exposure to blame when things went wrong with insufficient additional authority to change things to avert predictable problems.

I personally wouldn't accept it (assuming no pay increase), with the full understanding upfront that such an offer probably wouldn't come again and if I wanted a better opportunity in the future I'd have to leave the company to find it.

Probably in the long run and it depends on the lead duties. Do you have actual HR responsibility or is it leading a project or deliverables team?

The difference I’d draw is that HR is harder. People are complex and not always rational - HR reporting responsibilities requires extra of you. Also deciding compensation can be hard depending on the comp structure and team - that’s extra as well.

When given new leadership opportunities you should generally not go into it expecting to have your palm greased but you’d be right to expect marginal increases in your competition on your annual cycle.