Ask HN: Delegation Balance as an IT Manager

2 points by question11 6 years ago | 3 comments

I've had various roles in IT for over 25 years and currently am CTO in a 15 person startup. I seem to have a reoccurring theme in my career that I am a times 5 employee and can do everything. Development, devops, linux guru, marketing, business analyst, project manager, dba, vendor management, finance (MBA,CFA) etc. Great as a micro startup. Once there is outside money I get blamed by incoming staff for over-control and under delegation and not being available (as I am 120% booked)

- When I leave a place normally they need to hire 3-5 people to replace me and I feel like a shitty manager as people say I don't delegate enough

- I burn out

- There is a lot of technical debt because we moved so fast to hit business goals

- I have my finger in many many projects and am the kind of business guru in all of them (understand business better than sales and IT as well)

- recruiting is hard because I want to try to find people like myself which are rare and expensive.

I have justified this to myself as I am saving the company money. Any suggestions on how to manage this and avoid getting painted as a poor manager and better balance the whole thing? Maybe I should get out of IT and just hire people? Maybe I should just run everything like projects - but if I don't put my head in the weeds I don't fully understand stuff?

awsanswers 6 years ago |

Two areas of possibility, one not about you but the nature of IT:

If you worked at the pace required for the organization to "get it" each step of the way nothing would get done and you would have no evidence of success.

^ This is true to at least some degree IMO. Now on to you:

Can you find a way to be the 5x engineer who also communicates what the organization needs to know each step of the way? This means written and verbal communication, ahead of others having to ask for it.

In this way, you build a trail of documents that can be referenced as those who don't get it can be linked to along the way.

Back to the nature of IT: I see a lot of folks in positions of authority who are willing to drag the organization down into their slow pace by not really understanding what the hell is going on and dictating. (his doesn't sound like you but this person is in a position of authority wherever you are working)

question11 6 years ago | |

thanks for your response!

I will try to implement what you said... Perhaps it comes down to

1) hiring better for communication and tech skills 2) getting more senior devs 3) Work on communication

I recently tried to clone myself by hiring a bright young guy to take over some stuff. It ended up as a 3 month disaster. A week to do 30 minutes of work. He worked well in the office but can't seem to handle virtual teams (corona).

question11 6 years ago | |

kind an andy grove approach - sounds smart