Comment by kriro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kriro | Hacker News Reader

I think the key question here is...why manage one person. A one to one ratio of managers to "workers" seems completely rediculous to me. If you insist on one to one then assign a mentor, not a manager, at least if it's a technical domain and there's an option to assign someone that is not a pure manager.

If you're ever assigned to manage a single person, it's better to go big picture and wonder if this is a reasonable way to run a company (imo). If a single person is working on a project that requires oversight that person should be senior enough to "manage themselves". If they are too junior, the team should be bigger (because it's important enough to require oversight). If it's oversight due to legal issues that's fine but then the management can be hands of and should basically spot check that everything is following said legal requirements.

At least that's my humble opinion. I treat one on one manager to technical role relations as an organizational smell.

So this is primarily a problem with small companies, although you'll sometimes see it on teams when several people leave around the same time. The typical example is a non-VC backed small business, where a senior individual is hiring a junior person because that's all there's budget for at the moment.

But yes, its absolutely an anti-pattern, because as you've pointed out junior hires do need more oversight and help. I've rarely seen the situation work out.

I was a manager of one, and it's not even about junior or senior. My first report left (not because of me!), and my new report was much more senior, but I had a lot more managerial work to do because they didn't have the company knowledge and contacts to self-manage.

Thankfully, I was relieved of managerial duties shortly there after. I had only agreed to manage in the first place because we were a team of 12 with one manager, and that was too many reports, so half the team got to manage the other half, and my initial report was self-sufficient (well, we kind of all were), add some new hires and report moves and manager:report numbers got better.

Small companies often have situations where a clearly distinct function/department goes from one person to two; where someone who wasn't really an individual contributor but running a separate thing alone now is managing a 'team of two' including themselves.

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