Nice idea. I'm sort of straddling the position between management and engineer at this point in my career, so I understand the utility of meetings but also defi

Nice idea. I'm sort of straddling the position between management and engineer at this point in my career, so I understand the utility of meetings but also definitely appreciate how much more I can get done when I'm allowed to just be in the zone and define my own objectives. Do you think it would be feasible to have a competent manager assign somewhat high level tasks to engineer-managers, have them assign subtasks to engineers, and then have the engineer-managers deal with integration, systems design, and interfacing with real management? It seems like if that situation works in practice (I'm too new to know, and didn't go to management school, so this is largely experimental or anecdotal for me), tasks can simply be assigned by someone close enough to understand the complexity and skill of the engineers actually doing the coding via something like exchange based tasks, a to-do list of open issues that need to be dealt with, etc. Or do you think that the core engineer staff is not mature enough to handle that level of independence at most big companies? I would assume that at startups the structure is more flat in such a way as to make my suggestion less meaningful. I ask this because I'd really like to be a better manager, and I find that for myself, having a list of goals (i.e. "define API and write spec", "draw out abstraction structure", "CAD up mechanical enclosure", etc) is more than sufficient for me so long as I'm in regular enough communication with the people around me to know what those shortened descriptions mean for sure.