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Comment by mk89 | Hacker News Reader

I am just a developer and I really like your advice.

In my experience, though, I see managers and therefore companies struggling exactly because they do the opposite. They are unable to delegate, to trust and to think "he or she doesn't have the right experience to do it". Sometimes this stems from pride and arrogance - you are unable to admit that someone else can do what you are doing and you should maybe focus on something else. It can go as bad as a power play: if I grow people, eventually they want more and more.

Other times it comes simply from ignorance: I have always done it this way, and I am not sure how to move forward, because nobody in the team is ready to lead.

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Fwiw, there _are_ also times that there are no other people on the team who can do a thing.

I wonder how that can be, though. Either you are constantly surrounded by junior people, or...? I am sorry, but I can't believe that out of 10-15 people there is not a 20% of people who can do part of your job.

Yea more likely, I think, is that management is hesitant to give people a shot. They’re probably worried they’ll ask for more money or something.

I can tell you, out of 10-15 people, there are none that can do my job.

This is obviously untrue, they can definitely do it, and there are people I’d be happy to see in those roles, but the quality of work would suffer in the short term, and we have a ton of deadlines/projects to complete.

And without delegating the quality of work will suffer in the long term.

Which is better? Long term failure or short term hiccups?

Depends on whether you ask management.

That's the trap. If you don't let people jump in and fail just because you know you can do it better right now, they will never be good enough.

The problem is that at some point you'll become the bottleneck and projects will be delayed as a result. Or you'll get sick, a loved on gets sick, etc, etc. Either way productivity will suffer and things generally start to spiral downwards then (people get bored, leave the company, putting more work on you, etc.).

In many places there is always something urgent and there will never be a good time to slow down. Then you end up in my first point eventually. So part of your job is to create that breathing room, push back on projects, get people trained, etc. Think long term and not just moment to moment.

edit: And if you think training people now is painful, doing so when you're actually past the breaking point will be be a lot harder and cause a lot more disruption.

It's easy to talk about training people.

I spent a lot of time training people in my previous job only for them to come back to me with basic questions about what I taught them over a year later.

What was missing was technical leadership from above: the managers didn't realize (or value) the need for the team to get familiar with the systems that they were working on, so they didn't make sure that the team learned these things well, or brought in a few more people who could guide them in addition to just me.

In this case he is the manager so he can do all those things you mentioned to properly train his team. It takes effort and sacrifice but that's his job.

Both you and your manager have failed the rest of your team.

It’s on both of you to get at least one other person trained.

Then you should train them so they can do the thing. Having a bus factor of 1 is a bad thing even if you have room on your plate.

Aka, a “teaching moment.”

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