How to Delegate Technical Work as a Staff Engineer
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. ...