[shereadsthenews]

Agree on all these points except I’d elaborate. I’ve seen managers go from good to bad by not realizing a key difference between management of junior and senior engineers. For junior teams you want a manager who tells you what they want, clearly, as you said. However with senior engineers the manager needs to ask their reports what to do. Key difference! You tell junior people what to do but you _ask_ experienced people what to do. That’s the only way to benefit from their experience.

[whatshisface]

It's also a good idea to pick the brains of your junior and mid-level people, you never know when they have some information that might change your plans. If they spend all day working on a single component and you spend all day in meetings, they are virtually guaranteed to know a lot you don't - the only remaining question is whether or not something they know impacts your plans, and the only way to know is to be proactive.

It's easy to get into an uncomfortable situation where a superior gives an order and it falls on a junior to slam the entire team's brakes because something they know was overlooked.