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.