81–90 of 289 posts
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The amount of communication and reporting required increases with an increase in number of managers. By reducing number of levels and number of managers, you are reducing the amount of communication required in the first place.
Taking your logic to it’s conclusions—getting rid of all levels will reduce communication?
I have a long held belief that engineering managers are mostly a scam, and are actually just overpaid scrum masters. This is from working at some top companies
As the money got bigger we got more grifters / professional manager types. First thing they do is rebrand middle management as “leaders” and the other thing they do is make management non technical.
This has even bled into making higher level IC engineering roles being “above” coding. “Staff engineers don’t code, they set high level architecture “.
This is toxic to an engineering org in many ways. Firstly you now have a bunch of highly paid technical employees completely removed from how things actually work. But what’s worse is you created a culture where you’re incentived to follow - a senior engineer who wants to get promoted should write less code because coding is associated with being a low level employee.
The fundamental root cause is a misunderstanding of code as low level factory work and not intrinsically tied to the design and architecture. But it’s one of many ways in which traditional business structures and software engineering do not mesh and you need an extremely strong engineering leader to keep software culture on track, which very few organizations have.
Typical ratio of people to managers in a company is about 1:4, so that tracks. And before this becomes controversial, I don’t mean every manager has 4 reports, but because organization is a tree, for every 4 ICs, there’s one manager. For example, you could have 3PMs, 3 designers and 10 engineers, but the org could have 4 managers: 1 PM manager, 1 Design manager, 1 eng manager with 7 reportees and a sr manager with 3…
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If you have 50-200 direct reports, you’re not a “manager”. You’re effectively either a recruiter or procurement.
I remember interviewing someone once that claimed to have 200 direct reports. I was really blunt and said "nobody has 200 direct reports". They assured me that they did. So I grilled them on the mechanics of it. If you had biweekly 1x1s with all of your DRs, you would have to do 100 per week. If 1-on-1s were your fulltime job you could at most do 80 per week (2 per hour x 40 hrs). Thats just rotating through 1x1s. Th…
I was lucky for most of the time I had a great TL and a great manager so I had immediate and mid level buffers to shield me from most of office politics.
When that went away, I went soon after. Who willingly would deal with nutters. Not for that pay.
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Every time I see more than 10 direct reports, I think of this quote: "Yasser Arafat had 17 lieutenants (aka direct reports). Why? So he could pit them all against each other: if they were fighting each other and jockeying for position then they were too busy to go after him."
Interesting. Parent comment is about 4:1 even. In my career I saw from 5:1 to 20:1 IC to managers on a direct level. However the higher one go the better the ratio, like VP to SVP ratio rarely reaches 10:1 even. Now I'm curious what are the industry 'standard' numbers.
I was once put in charge of over 20 direct reports against my wishes.
At that ratio, you’re not really managing the team in a traditional sense. You’re providing high level direction and dealing with the individual issues that are most pressing.
It invariably becomes a situation where there are team leads acting as pseudo-managers for groups of the people you’re managing.
On the other hand, it did make me more efficient as a manager. Whenever I encounter teams with 3-4 people and a full-time manager who only manages them, it feels inefficient. Either the manager is stretching managerial duties within the team too far to fill their time, or the company has an unreasonable amount of process and cruft that takes up managers’ time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every time I see more than 10 direct reports, I think of this quote: "Yasser Arafat had 17 lieutenants (aka direct reports). Why? So he could pit them all against each other: if they were fighting each other and jockeying for position then they were too busy to go after him."
Interesting. Parent comment is about 4:1 even. In my career I saw from 5:1 to 20:1 IC to managers on a direct level. However the higher one go the better the ratio, like VP to SVP ratio rarely reaches 10:1 even. Now I'm curious what are the industry 'standard' numbers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have 50-200 direct reports, you’re not a “manager”. You’re effectively either a recruiter or procurement.
I’ve heard of companies where hundreds of people officially report to person X but there are “mentors” with 3-5 mentees that seem an awful lot like other company’s mangers. Not sure what the point is exactly.
A promotion to "manager" is expected to come with a pay raise. Acting as a "mentor", less so.
I have a long held belief that engineering managers are mostly a scam, and are actually just overpaid scrum masters. This is from working at some top companies
My manager does little else besides asking what everyone is working on every day. We could automate her position with a slack bot and get the same results.
That’s mgmt for you
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You might be right, but that might be because they're just really bad managers. A good engineering manager shouldn't be there to herd engineers. A good engineering manager is there to protect their engineers from the organization, ensure they have the resources required to do the work, and to make sure their organizational goals, development, and wellbeing are being advocated and cared for. Scrum masters shouldn't ca…
I feel some people have never had a good manager, and so they don’t realize just how much bullshit they can insulate you from.