Who does what and how to support them - by Anton Zaides

Engineers and managers constantly juggle three competing layers: what must be done right now, how to grow engineers toward their career aspirations, and where promotion opportunities lie. The first layer is pure efficiency-assign the most capable person to the urgent task. The second layer asks you to align work with an engineer's long-term goals, such as giving a mid-level engineer leadership chances or challenging senior talent with new domains. The third layer forces you to create stretch assignments that prove readiness for promotion, even if they sacrifice short-term speed.

The piece warns against letting inertia dominate: once a pattern of assigning the same people to the same work solidifies, it becomes hard to shift-even when the business needs change. It introduces "activation energy" as the small, deliberate steps that lower the cost of change, like rotating ownership or offering incremental challenges to break reliance on a single knowledge holder. A practical exercise is building a knowledge map that tags each engineer by tech stack, systems owned, and soft skills, then reading it by rows to assess current coverage and by columns to surface growth opportunities.

By applying Andy Grove's "task-relevant maturity" concept, you stop basing support on seniority alone and instead match the level of guidance to the specific task maturity. This shifts the classic "more senior, less support" formula to a nuanced view where even senior engineers may need coaching on unfamiliar domains. The result is a more resilient team that can pivot when needed without losing productivity or stalling career development.

The author also shares a personal endorsement of a related workshop on decision-making for engineering leaders, underscoring that the ideas presented are actionable and grounded in real-world practice. Managers who adopt the knowledge-map exercise and the inertia-activation framework can make clearer, faster decisions about who does what and how to support them, ultimately improving both team performance and individual growth.