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I have this exact same fear as an IC.

I wonder if Engineering Managers have this same fear, or they’re used to having to distribute complex tasks to senior engineers and gamble with seeming less risky tasks to juniors that may leave ticking time bombs in their code. Just the nature of code written by agents or humans?

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Yes, that definitely happens as an EM. You want your Senior/Staff engineers to architect out the new high-risk functionality into a doc for review. Then that Staff engineer either implements or has a junior/senior under their wing helping implement some of the scaffolding.

In this [common] paradigm the Staff Engineer acts as a architect/programmer and project manager in one. The EM should be there to guide and unblock.

Yes, that is absolutely a dynamic in managing an engineering team, and I'd argue that knowing the right person to give a particular task to, and how much detail they're going to need to get it done, is what separates good engineering managers from bad ones.

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