> Your level of management involvement scales (micro to macro) as your team member becomes more senior, and you’re able to trust their work, and they’re able to trust your direction. I’ve made this mistake where I had a junior employee, gave them tons of autonomy and freedom, and they floundered and felt “unmanaged”. To me, I was just “not micro-managing” them. To them, I just wasn’t managing at all.

At work, we have job grades basically on even numbers: '4' is a fresh-out-of-college new hire, '6' would be someone with a Master's degree or a couple years' experience, '8' would be 3-5 years' experience, and so forth.

The rule of thumb I was given when talking with managers was this: you always need to regularly meet with each employee to review their list of tasks and priorities and make sure they're on track. You should meet with a '4' once a day, a '6' once a week, an '8' once a month, and a '10' (senior engineer) once a quarter. It's a rough rule of thumb, but it sets the expectations: a new hire should require more consistent contact and direction-setting than someone senior, who should be able to set directions more independently and just check in.