Leadership

Staff engineers who don’t delegate end up in one of two failure modes: they become overloaded individual contributors whose leadership impact is capped by their own bandwidth, or they become bottlenecks whose teams can’t move without their direct involvement. Either way, the scope of work they can affect is limited to what they can personally execute. Delegation is how staff engineers multiply their impact. But delegating badly — unclear expectations, no feedback loop, rescue when things get hard — teaches people less than not delegating at all and produces lower-quality outcomes. ...

Most engineers have an uncomfortable relationship with the phrase “managing up.” It sounds like politics, like playing games, like doing something other than the real work. The discomfort is understandable — and it leads to a lot of staff engineers doing excellent technical work that doesn’t get funded, prioritized, or protected. Managing up is not about manipulation or self-promotion. It’s about ensuring that the people responsible for resource allocation, roadmap decisions, and organizational priorities have accurate information about the work you’re doing and why it matters. When you manage up poorly, decisions get made with incomplete information. That’s bad for the organization and bad for the work you care about. ...