Heroes of the proletariat

The engineers. They are the engine of the industry. They are the creators of the modules, the implementers. 

From "The Girl in the Fireplace" Dr. Who (2006)

In the 19^th century the European great engineers built smart clock mechanisms, they mastered the art of mechanics engineering to a level that probably will never return. Today’s engineers sit in front of a computer, use IDEs to write code and debug it. Essentially both groups are the same – they create new and complicated machines. Modern engineers simply build much complicated machines, and they manage to do it mostly because they have far better tools.

The creation process is a noble act: You imagine something that does not yet exists and you make it come true – that’s cool!

This entire introduction is just to be sure you will not take the engineers too lightly. Maybe for some commodity work a programmer is a programmer. But for the disruptive team, each engineer is really a special entity, which utilizes his ideas, imagination and experience.

Following their manager’s narrative – the engineers should be able to make decisions. I usually prefer to assign responsibility covering every aspect of the task to the engineer – even if he is new at his job. It is better to assign it to him and help continuously, then working in an environment that your absence cause everything to stall or collapse.

The downside to this is that not every engineer is a manager. On top of that – no matter how smart is the engineer – most of the time he is floating in the virtual world of his code. He is not really in the room. Therefore – you should carefully balance the amount of assistance and responsibility you assign according to the person’s capacity. But don’t get too alarmed by this warning à you should continue and strive to assign as much responsibility as possible to your engineers.