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Comment by geokon | Hacker News Reader

out of curiosity, what issues did you see?

20 to one seems kinda low in my experience. At my last deskjob it about 30-50 to 1 and it felt like a good balance. My team and I (~5 people) met with the manager once a week for a couple of hours. Id estimate they had 2-3 meetings a day with other teams. Project direction and blockers were dicussed and adjusted. It felt optimal, enough to get guidance, but they were too busy to micromanage and get in the way. Non-high-level nitty gritty day to day issues were just resolved within the team throughout the week

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I don't know how well that works, but I can assure you what you've described is not at all a typical management arrangement in this industry

yeah, im trying to figure out why people took Office Space as a guidebook instead of satire

Hence my question as to what the parent found problematic with a manager with many reports. Its possible self managed teams of ~5 don't work in many environments. Any larger group and i could see friction

You need excellent team working and communication skills in each team, since there is no team leader and the set-of-5 report to the manager. I bet someone wears a defacto manager hat in each team and keeps things organized.

Wow. With 30 to 50 people to 1 manager, the manager is spending 15-25 hrs simply in 30 min employee 1 on 1s every week.

That’s an absolutely insane number. That means if they spread it out evenly over the week, they will be spending 3-5 hrs every day on 1 on 1s.

In our company we also don’t have purely people managers. Even when I was managing people who were working on projects that had nothing to do with me, I had to gain a Technical understanding of their projects so we could have educated discussions and I could actually guide and help them with issues they might be facing, even if it was simply knowing who to direct them towards. We also tend to have small teams, with no project exceed about 5 devs.

If I was managing 30-50 people, that would have meant having an understanding of 6-10 wildly different projects at least.

Again, that seems well beyond the mental capacity of someone who is already spending about 50% of their work hours simply on 1 on 1s every week.

You wouldn't do 1-1s like this with 50 direct reports.

yes because you would be managing seven managers who are managing seven people each. the one on ones would be with your seven directs, not your 50 skip levels.

> If I was managing 30-50 people,...

I directly managed 22 people at one point. 1:1s were an every other week affair. While it was possible, it was not sustainable. Keeping track of everyone and their goals & growth, flogging the PM team, running interference with the Sales team, keeping the exec team from interfering, etc. made it far more than a full time job. I was first in the office and last to leave, just so I could get stuff done.

Having a 1 on 1 with each report every 2 weeks is the problem here, not the amount of people. Where did this 1 on 1 stuff make it into the manager bible? You do your job and if you don't like something, ask for a 1 on 1. If your senior notices something, he arranges a 1 on 1. But this is also way too late already. A good manager picks up on issues way before this point.

But a weekly 1-1 would be excessive regardless

> The manager is spending 15-25 hrs simply in 30 min employee 1 on 1s every week.

That leaves them with nothing to do but the crossword for the other 15 hours of the week.

LOL. One person in your team was a manager on an IC salary, and your manager was a director on a manager salary.

Funny I never got paid much/any more for team leading the times I did it so I refuse to do it anymore. Also reflected in the market for new jobs. What people are calling a director here does pay a bit more.

Or maybe your org has too many layers. Teams of smart people should be able to mostly self-direct.

That is… I mean, I don’t have a lot of love for managerial positions to begin with but even I can admit that a people manager should have at most 6 or 7 direct reports. 30-50 is completely (laughably?) untenable. I mean, even grade school teachers only have 25-30 students a piece at most and that’s, like, bare bones budgeting.

How is a team that is meeting their manager consisting only of 5 people if the manager has 30-50 people reporting into them? I wasn't sure if it was a typo or where you actually advocating for a manager to have 30-50 direct reports?

Yes. The manager managed 6+ teams. They had decades of industry experience and were very good at.. Management? dealing with project scope, knowing what clients would find useful, when to change direction etc.

Managing a team is realistically not a full time job.

He did not write any code or independently make technical decisions nor act as a mentor or senior dev or anything like that. He used to write code, so could follow technical discussions but he wasnt some topdog 10xer. He just managed and he was good at it. Since he was involved in many concurrent projects he also knew the organization and talent very well

Manager in my parlance is heavily working on growing me and the others in my team as well as managing or product portfolio. As others said that sounds like a director. Who runs the day to day off the team. Or do you only sync once a week?

i guess its situational.

I'm not clear what "the day to day off the team" actually means in concrete terms. I dont mean it in a dismissive way, genuinely curious

You need to work with someone or get feedback, then you go talk to the relevant person..? If you really need you could go run something by the manager. Again i dont really see that being a full time daily job (for just one team). Just a few hours here and there. I guess the major sync is once a week, but youre generally in the loop with whats going on throughout the week

"heavily working on growing me"

You work together with your team and learn from each other. Often there is one person with more years of experience with any particular issue

Technical mentorship is great but almost completely separate from managment

Day to day from my experience:

- When there are blockers, especially with other teams. e.g. priorities mismatch

- Task assignments, priorities

- The project management side of things

I've worked in teams where the "manager" had several teams. But in those situations each team had 1 or 2 that were leads, either officially or not. But they worked with the rest of the team and were basically managers except for the people management responsibilities (performance reviews, hiring, firing etc).

Who's running the sprints, dealing with Hr issues, doing evaluations, sorting out interpersonal issues, talking with product, etc. Or is someone on the team like the team lead doing all of that, or a TPM, project manager, etc.

Who makes the long term tradeoff decisions on staffing, maintenance, product priorities, etc.

That's the day to day of a team.

That’s a director.

My job also calls this a manager. I’m the technical team lead and my boss (our manager) manages 3 separate teams consisting of a QA, 3-4 devs, and a then we have a PO (who is part of a separate management structure and reports to a different person).

Boss is ultimately responsible for hiring/firing/pay (aside from some minor HR stuff) although he mostly relies on my assessment of people’s technical acumen. He attends our daily standups and likes to show up for important meetings. He also handle big picture estimations of how long our dev process is going to take, with my input.

Does that make me the devs manager? Maybe? So far the position is like a 70% technical 30% managerial position it feels like.

Interesting. In the Big Tech companies I've worked at, the manager is the people-oriented equivalent of the technical team lead and controls promotions within an org structure. Why do you need one? Generally to free the technical lead's time up to deal with people concerns less. In smaller companies this doesn't matter as there just aren't that many people to deal with but at a larger company, a big technical project can interact with enough different stakeholders that you need a dedicated people manager to deal with them.

Managers are also expected to help their direct reports grow by offering them feedback. Manager feedback and regular performance evaluations eventually lead to raises and promotions which then builds up a manager's experience level. This often becomes a target in itself where managers try to optimize to promote their direct reports at the expense of more holistic growth so they can get a promotion.

Each team gets a manager because the manager controls promotions at the company and maintains employee standards.

In my org we'd call what you do a coordinator. Handles prioritization but is not above the team in hierarchy.

That’s job title inflation!

i guess its semantic。。do you meet your director every week for several hours?

I'm genuinely curious bc it was my one and only proper deskjob. Every other corporate structure sounds like office space

Ah that's what confused me. So typically a manager managing other teams (or managers) is not a front line manager (eg senior mgr or dir). I think the op was referring to directly managing 20 reports which is imo quote brutal (imagine just doing 30 min 1/1 with 20 people each week)?

One of each team must have spent more time with the clients, planning, communicating with the official manager etc. That's a level in the managerial structure.

5 people in one meeting, done 2-3 times per day, for 4 days per week => 40-60 people

At those ratios, your "manager" doesn't really know what everyone does or how they are performing. Nor what their career goals are, what they're good at or not good at.

Really that's just a director level position with a manager title. I assume the teams have some person that's acting as the lead.

> 30-50 to 1 and it felt like a good balance. My team and I (~5 people) met with the manager once a week for a couple of hours.

That's a pretty broad range, from conservative estimate 12 hours of staff meetings weekly for 30 people and 2, to 30 hours on the high side. This leaves no room for reporting up, or for relationship building via 1:1s, promotions, hiring and budget planning, among other responsibilities.

imagine trying to have 30 minute one on ones with 50 people. that's 1500 minutes, or 25 hours! Besides the mental insanity that kind of Zoom fatigue would induce, that only leaves 15 hours of room for "real work," which, because you are a manager, is probably 90% occupied by meetings!

Who did you share your career goals, people problems, peer feedback, and compensation questions with?

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