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What's Dotted line reporting?

It's when you have more than one boss, which brings you to such brilliance as:

Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses, Bob.

Bob Porter: Eight?

Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it.

If I understand correctly: it's the idea that you have a direct manager who handles your HR related things (direct line report), and you have product leads and other people you report to who are not directly in your org or team.

And it sucks when your dotted line zigzags across the Atlantic a couple times like mine does (both above and below me).

A lot of devs don't realize that other than your HR manager, you can ignore others. Anytime a PM asked me something unreasonable, I simply said no and if They pretended like i need to obey them, I got my real manager involved. It always worked out in my favor.

It saddens me to see so many devs especially the H1Bs getting abused by PMs.

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