Learning to let go of things
As you grow, your scope and domain of expertise will become wider – and very soon you will find yourself struggling to do everything you want to do
- You’ll have too many meetings where you feel your presence is required
- You’ll have too many pull requests you think you have to review
- You’ll have too many projects you assume you have to implement
This is a situation you have to address – or you will overwork yourself and eventually burn out.
Growing out of this situation is non trivial, it was personally the most difficult change I had to go through – I had to delegate and more importantly to learn to let go of things.
When you start delegating some of your responsibilities, you may feel that the person taking over might not be as good as you – and they likely won’t be at first. At that time, you probably have more experience, knowledge and expertise on your domain so in the short term things might slightly regress – and that’s OK. Others need both the opportunity and the space to improve.
You should try to support your peers who are stepping up to take over some of your responsibilities, but you should take a support role – let them run the show and back them up when they need it (not when you think you can help). Trust your peers to grow into good engineers – don’t micro-support them (like a bad manager would micro-manage them).
Your team will grow up stronger and youradditional free time is an opportunity for you to grow further (e.g. by focusing on other unstaffed large problems).