I was reading a business book yesterday and saw an interesting statistic. The book asserted that in most organizations, the senior/principal/partner-level technical staff are significantly under-delegated. That is, almost 50% of the tasks could be performed by more junior personnel. This was presented as a key financial issue, because if you can move tasks to people that you pay less, then you can have your more highly-paid staff working on more advanced things, and thus you can scale out and improve your margins.

But… (there had to be a “but”, or I wouldn’t have written about this)

In the sentences that followed, the author made an important point. They stated, and I paraphrase, “the tasks could be completed with the proper quality controls and oversight“. (emphasis mine)

You see the issue?

There’s at least two possible analogies here, and as a technical leader it’s key you figure out which is the correct one for your organization.

The first analogy is, “I’ve hired people to sweep the floor at my restaurant, but I want to make sure the quality is where it needs to be. So I’m not going to have my very best chef sweep the floor, their time is more valuable, but that chef does have the responsibility of making sure the floor is swept properly.” This comes with its own set of problems that I’ve seen discussed in many other books and blogs, namely, the “its faster for me to do it myself, to the level of quality that I want it, than it is to try and teach someone to get there”. Then of course, there’s the other concept of by training someone, you eventually build the skills and experience to grow another superstar.

But I want to talk about a second possible analogy. That is, maybe it really is harder to sweep floors than we think, or at least, sweep them to the level of quality that we need. This is something I talk about a lot. Finding people who can just “write code” is not that difficult, and their code probably even works. But finding someone who can write code, write comments, write the documentation, add it to the CI/CD pipeline, make sure it deploys on multiple operating systems and oh also on a container, make sure there’s logging, make sure there’s no security vulnerabilities, make sure it can be patched later. Now all of a sudden its a lot harder than you realized to find that person.

I believe that this is related to another phenomenon I’ve seen, which is when talking to a high-performing individual I frequently hear, “the talent market is very challenging, we cannot find people with the right skills we need”. If so many organizations have this problem, how can they also have the problem of their seniors being “under-delegated”? My hypothesis here is that it is not true that the seniors are under-delegated, we just have unrealistic expectations of the quality of work expected from people at different points in their career.

To restate this in a business financials way, the market will pay for supply and demand. So if its “really hard” to find technical staff to perform at the level you want, then maybe you have unrealistic expectations of what early career or junior people have experience in. So you can either grow them yourself, or accept that fact that you DO need to pay senior-level staff to perform tasks, if you want them done to the level of quality you are seeking.