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Comment by yeswecatan | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually going through this at my current job. We have a team of 8 where some report to essentially the head of the team and some report to me, a "lead", who reports to the head. This makes absolutely no sense to me. I'm hearing that things are setup this way because having 7 direct reports is too many. Even if we ignore the weird org chart, having say two teams of four doesn't make sense to me if everybody is working on the same things.

Can someone please explain if I'm thinking of this the right way or not?

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7 direct reports is very normal for a manager. One thing to dig into is whether they think 7 direct reports is too many for you (as opposed to anyone) and they just don't want to say it directly. This could be because they think you are spending too much time on IC tasks (coding) and won't be able to handle that many, you're too junior (recently started managing), or there are other issues going on with you or the other lead that your senior management hasn't been explicit about. You can do this constructively by asking more about what they'd be looking for to show that you could handle that scope and how to set goals/improve to get there.

7 direct reports actually seems fine if this person's role is primarily management. If they're also doing some combination of tech lead/product stuff they may want fewer reports to free up time for non-management activity.

Delegating some subset of direct reports seems less like it's about product or technical direction and more about aggregating and filtering management concerns. Presumably the whole team still works on the same thing and plans their work together, it's just that you do half the 1:1s, deal with what you can, and kick things up the chain if you can't.

I guess I'm jut having difficulty defining what my team does vs. others that are on the same larger team. There's also a weird extra level on the org chart where ICs on my team and ICs on the head of the team are on different levels on paper.

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