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Comment by betaby | Hacker News Reader

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.

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20:1 is terrible. You may not have managers but other ICs then need to burden themselves with management duties. Even if you have 1:1 for half an hour every week, that’s 10 hours of just 1:1s. There is no reasonable way to keep track of it. It’s bad for the manager, it’s bad for the IC. Anything more than 10 is bad, ideal would be 7-8 reportees.

My manager has a bit more than 20 direct reports, and it works well in my experience. We have 1:1 every two weeks, but often there's not much to say.

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.

So you do have managers, just different titles.

The difference is that they are not managing me, they "manage" their area of expertise. Better than an "all-rounder" who is doing PO, SM, HR, approving vacations and doing 1 on 1s ...

> In my career I saw from 5:1 to 20:1 IC to managers on a direct level.

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.

What you described in first half is how things should (and used) to work imo.

> 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?

industry standard is 8:1, per https://lethain.com/sizing-engineering-teams/

3-7 is considered the optimal number in high risk (emergency services) situations. Beyond 7, you start to lose insight into what all is going on.

bytedance has 50-200 reports per manager in some teams and are wildly successful

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)

200 reports per manager means there’s a lot of ICs who are managers on IC salaries doing free added labor.

yes, bytedance eng ICs reportedly spend more time talking across dozens of peers and coordinating.

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. 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.

Exactly. There's a ceiling of span of control, stemming from hours in a week and maximum efficiency.

Bytedance Eng managers don’t do any 1:1s.

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.

> 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 mean manager has at least some power, 'mentors' or 'leads' - don't. At current org. we have ~20 ICs in the department and one manager, there are clearly 3, maybe 4 folks who are more senior in experience and more influential, but no, no one perceive them as managers.

Given the grandparent was talking about Bytedance, perhaps you're the floor supervisor for dozens of disposable people watching reported or flagged content to identify porn, violence, etc. on TikTok - disposable because depending on what sort of banned content actually gets posted, you might have a lot of mental trauma and burnout that the company would really rather just replace people than deal with.

I was talking about engineering at bytedance. Developer teams.

then bytedance doesn't have managers

Wildly successful how?

A little app called TikTok.

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