How do you grow the engineers on your team?

Question

Accepted Answer

Growing engineers is a core, often underweighted, part of leading. Your team's ceiling is the sum of its people's skills, and you raise it by **giving people stretch work, coaching, and feedback**, not by doing the hard parts for them.

## How to mentor in practice

```text
✓ DELEGATE stretch work — slightly beyond their current level
✓ Let them STRUGGLE productively — don't rescue too early
✓ Coach with QUESTIONS — "what have you tried?" beats giving the answer
✓ Give SPECIFIC feedback, soon, both praise and growth areas
✓ Make GROWTH visible — connect work to their career goals
✓ Model the behavior you want — they watch what you do
```

## A concrete example

A mid-level engineer has never designed a service. Instead of designing it yourself, you hand them the design with guardrails: "draft the approach, I'll review it with you before we build." They learn by doing; you catch the risks in review.

## The trade-off

Mentoring is slower *now*, the engineer takes longer than you would, and may stumble. But it pays back many times over as they handle more without you. Optimizing only for short-term speed keeps your team junior forever.

## A pitfall

Don't only delegate boring work. People grow from interesting, challenging problems. Hoarding the good work for yourself signals you don't trust them.

## Why it matters

Engineers who grow stay, and they take work off your plate, freeing you to lead.

A TL who develops people builds a team that outlasts any single project.

That is the most durable thing you can leave behind.