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 engineers & the 3 managers reporting to him/her.
"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."
The manager can manage that many people because he's not involved with our day-to-day work. We have a Scrum Master and Product Owner who handle their "management" parts. If there's some problem which needs manager's attention it's typically SM who communicates that.
The manager takes part in some meetings (like planning), but mostly just listening.
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.
> 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.
Because it is?
my suspicion is lower numbers are more a function of worker power (demand for 1:1s, career growth conversation, offloading more tasks to your manager, etc)
You’re effectively either a recruiter or procurement.
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. That's not doing anything else.
He claimed "team leads" did 1x1s, which is fine, but its hard to call them a direct report if you're not even aware of their daily work. Theres just no way you can adequately manage 200 people. As mentioned above, you are just a glorified HR person, you're no longer in engineering.
I would never hire a manager below Director level that isn't themselves an individual contributor. I know its possible to have that but I wouldnt hire it, because we expect IC on our teams.
A promotion to "manager" is expected to come with a pay raise. Acting as a "mentor", less so.
Over the last 10 years, we have improved productivity tools, and for every other role the expectations are higher.
I find it funny that the ratio of ICs:Managers has not gone up and the industry doesn't discuss that it should go up or what tools we need to help make it grow.
Isn't increasing productivity by solving hard problems why we get paid? My biggest question is, why isn't it even talked about and/or have aspirational goals set up?