In general I support the idea of delegating more. Which is inherently scary because you're of necessity delegating tasks to people who are less competent at it than you are. And there are lessons you need to learn, such as the fact that it is dangerous to have real decisions made in a 3-level meeting (employee, manager, manager's manager) because it is too easy to accidentally undermine the manager.
That said, it is extremely important to distinguish between a technical lead and a people manager. They require different skillsets and mentalities. It is more likely that a competent developer will make a good tech lead than a happy manager. "Promoting" a developer who doesn't actively want it is too often a mistake that the developer solves by finding a more suitable job. Don't lose sight of the fact that when you promote your best developer to manager, the only things that are guaranteed are that you've lost a good developer and gained an inexperienced manager.
This is why many tech companies have established parallel promotion tracks for tech and people management. With neither being inherently superior to the other. In fact Google's top employee, Jeff Dean, manages nobody. See https://ai.google/research/people/jeff for more on him.
Jeff Dean manages a lot of people. He's currently the head of the RMI division if I remember correctly and has at least a few thousand employees under him. Sanjay on the other hand has remained an individual contributor.
> In general I support the idea of delegating more. Which is inherently scary because you're of necessity delegating tasks to people who are less competent at it than you are.
They may be less competent than you are at managing four people. But they may be more competent at directly managing four people than you are at directly managing 15 people...
That said, it is extremely important to distinguish between a technical lead and a people manager. They require different skillsets and mentalities. It is more likely that a competent developer will make a good tech lead than a happy manager. "Promoting" a developer who doesn't actively want it is too often a mistake that the developer solves by finding a more suitable job. Don't lose sight of the fact that when you promote your best developer to manager, the only things that are guaranteed are that you've lost a good developer and gained an inexperienced manager.
This is why many tech companies have established parallel promotion tracks for tech and people management. With neither being inherently superior to the other. In fact Google's top employee, Jeff Dean, manages nobody. See https://ai.google/research/people/jeff for more on him.