Back at the beginning of March – which seems like a long, long time ago – I gave a talk at QCon London 2020 on delegation. InfoQ have kindly made the talk available for free. You can use their website to watch the talk along with an automatically advancing slideshow. You can also download the audio to listen as a podcast. Neat!

In the talk, I cover:

• What delegation is
• Common delegation anti-patterns such as micromanagement and fire-and-forget
• A framework for delegating anything to anyone
• How delegation links to how people learn new skills
• A primer on Stoic philosophy to help you stop worrying about letting go of control.

This has been one of the first recorded talks of mine that I’ve watched back and thought “Huh, that’s actually pretty good!”

I hope you enjoy it. The content was pieced together from various sections of my book, Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager. If you like what you see, check it out. There’s an older, shorter piece on delegation on this site also.