Mentorship

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. ...

Giving feedback is one of the most high-leverage things a senior engineer does — and one of the most consistently underdeveloped skills in the profession. Most engineers who are technically excellent struggle with feedback because the skills are completely different. Writing good code requires precision and correctness. Giving feedback that changes behavior requires understanding why the behavior exists and what conditions would change it. This post is about technical feedback specifically: code reviews, design critiques, architecture discussions, and the kind of direct feedback about someone’s technical work that either helps them grow or falls flat. ...