Note, I'm not saying there are never situations where you'd delegate something that you can do yourself (the whole concept of apprenticeship is based on doing just that). Just that it's not an expectation, e.g., you don't expect a CEO to be able to do the CTO's job.

I guess I'm not 100% sure I agree with my original point though, should a programmer working on JavaScript for a website's frontend be able to implement a browser engine. Probably not, but the original point I was trying to make is I would expect a programmer working on a browser engine to be able to re-implement any abstractions that they're using in their day-to-day work if necessary.

The advice I've seen with delegation is the exact opposite. Specifically: you can't delegate what you can't do.

Partially because of all else fails, you'll need to step in and do the thing. Partially because if you can't do it, you can't evaluate whether it's being done properly.

That's not to say you need to be _as good_ at the task as the delegee, but you need to be competent.

For example, this HBR article [1]. Pervasive in all advice about delegation is the assumption that you can do the task being delegated, but that you shouldn't.

> Just that it's not an expectation, e.g., you don't expect a CEO to be able to do the CTO's job.

I think the CEO role is actually the outlier here.

I can only speak to engineering, but my understanding has always been that VPs need to be able to manage individual teams, and engineering managers need to be somewhat competent if there's some dev work that needs to be done.

This only happens as necessary, and it obviously should be rare. But you get in trouble real quickly if you try to delegate things you cannot accomplish yourself.

1. https://hbr.org/2025/09/why-arent-i-better-at-delegating

I think what you're trying to reference is APIs or libraries, most of which I wouldn't consider abstractions. I would hope most senior front-end developers are capable of developing a date library for their use case, but in almost all cases it's better to use the built in Date class, moment, etc. But that's not an abstraction.

There's an interesting comparison in delegation where for example people that stop programming through delegation do lose their skills over time.