I don't know why you were downvoted -- you're exactly right. It's also the reason why there are plenty of directors at google with no team, and plenty of lower level managers with 20, 50 or more directs (often lots of TVCs).
An observation from my work experience is that, while things run efficiently with smaller teams overall, small teams also tend to make it easier for any given leader to have a reasonably good idea what's going on across their org (it's easier to grok a 50 person team's work when it's split into 10 mgr teams than if it were completely flat), but that also puts the lower level managers' jobs at risk because their director is more likely not to consider them essential -- ironically, because things are running smoothly.
I agree with the part about the number of people being managed, however usually there's a huge difference in management structure. For instance we have some standard big corp and its tech department. So you'd have a developer,senior developer,tech lead, some sort of team manager.Then the team manager would be reporting to the person that runs the particular division or department. The head of the department would report to some VP who would eventually report to the CTO. In a small company that'd be like developer=> CTO. That "Chief",in which case it loses the purpose.
OP’s post was “ Aggressively small teams, with no hands-off middle-management layer”. 6-8 swe teams + hands off people manager reporting to middle manager, who reports to director, is how Amazon organizes teams, therefore it isn’t an example of what their suggestion was...
The other side of the point is that having manager with small team means those manager need managers, which means another layer. Big team manager means flatter hierarchy which may be desired by everyone.
But yeah following Goodhart's law it's bad if it makes managers hire new people instead of vanquishing other managers and taking other employees under their direct command.
Smaller orgs should be mostly flat. When I see 20 person companies with too many "directors" and "managers", it's a bad sign. Too many bosses, not enough workers.
The smaller the org, the more you want someone that actually understands the work being managed. Maybe your team is getting work done fast, but it's not done right: no documentation, few tests, architectural flaws, performance issues, security problems... Someone should be able to understand the trade off made, and be able to explain them. When one of your engineers gives you an estimate, you need to understand if it's reasonable. Is it too optimistic? Is he blowing smoke up your ass and spending 2 months on a 2 week job? Poor management sets arbitrary deadlines and wonders why they aren't met.
I work at a place where a manager has around 20 people, and Google is told to have much bigger departments. But are you meaning people manager or technical manager? If your manager really directs your work, then yes 20 is too much.
> if you need to go above or around them in the org
In this case, the whole company has around 10 employees, so I assume there isn't much in the way of management. I understood "director" to be the big boss, maybe sharing his position with one other.
Yes and no. It's hard for any given manager to support a large team - managing too many often results in either burning out, or being very hands-off with the team... limited career coaching, limited knowledge of the individual context, etc. And it's somewhat worse at higher levels of middle management, where the individual is responsible for aggregating the needs of between say 2 and 25x that of the managers below them.
Of course, it's not that simple. avg 5 reports vs 10 is only 1 or 2 on org chart depth, but almost 2x on the number of middle managers. (And so 3 sounds particularly bad, if you're 'average').
If middle management is growing because the company is growing, that's probably fine, including resetting after large growth in the lower levels. If it's growing because fan-in is reducing, that's more of a concern... possibly managers are becoming lower quality, or there's a lot more top-down burden, or individuals are becoming harder to manage (for many reasons). None of those are great signs.
I'd suggest it has something to do with coordination.
When you have a small team, you can more easily arrange for that team to all pull in the same direction. When you pass a certain threshold of employees (I'm not going to suggest 40, the number is clearly going to vary in the real world) a lot more effort is required to coordinate the work of employees. This means more middle managers, more meetings, more email traffic, more office politics as teams start to fragment, etc... All of these things can hamper productivity if not handled correctly.
Funny that you mention that but the comment you're replying to prompted me to do some back of the envelope calculations.
Things to note:
- About half Google's staff were technical
- There are ~80k employees?
- So assume 40k engineers
- Most engineers are ICs
- ICs are given levels from T3 (college grad) to T9 (can walk on water) with there being like a handful of Google Fellows beyond that (your Jeff Deans).
- Managers are M1s through M3s with M1s being baby managers. Most are M2s (equivalent to T6) who are managers of ICs and M3s (T7s) who are managers of managers (and higher level ICs).
- Higher level ICs (T7+) may well directly report to M2s or even directors or VPs but there's so few of those (~1%?) that they don't really change the math.
- In terms of rolled up head count you're looking at 5-20 for an M1/M2, 20-50 for an M3, 50-200 for a director, 150-1000+ for a VP.
- Directors have levels, D1 (T8) and D2 (T9). Sometimes you end up with 2 or even 3 directors within a management chain.
- The archetypal management chain is: CEO -> SVP -> VP -> Director -> M3 -> M1/M2 -> IC
So my opinion is the structure should ideally look something like this:
- M1/M2 average 10 ICs
- M3s average 5 M1/M2s
- Directors average 5 M3s
- VPs average 4 directors
with the following constraints:
- There is only 1 VP in a chain
- There is only 1 SVP in a chain
- There is only 1 director in a chain
- There are at most 2 managers in a chain
So 40K ICs need:
- 4K M1/M2s
- 800 M3s
- 160 directors
- 40 VPs
Now this "ideal" scenario obviously ignores some realities like a management structure built around products and infrastructure may not fit these numbers so neatly but then again some M1s could have 12 ICs while others have 8 and it all sort of works out.
I don't know what Google's numbers are here but I suspect it is MUCH MUCH higher than this.
I’ve noticed that in larger technology companies there has also been a trend towards getting a “Manager” title but leading a team of 1-2 people. Maybe there will be intent to grow this to 3-4 people or more in future years, but that hinders giving others a title and their own small team (which can be considered career progression).
Then you might see another leader (Manager of Managers, or “MoM”) who has 5 of these small-team managers, a different title, but a total organization size of 10-15 people.
This feels like a shift from a generation ago when the bigger technology companies wanted flatter organizations and most managers would have teams of 8-12 people, the MoM roles might be 50-80 people, and beyond that executive roles with 100s of people.
The idea that a manager’s success should be measured in the number of people below them is truly idiotic. That is how you end up with companies like Google increasing their headcount by massive amounts during the pandemic only to have to turn around and do layoffs a year later.
Middle managers serve a role but honestly many of them can be replaced without really disrupting anything. At a certain point, you become too far removed from the actual work that is being done to really matter.
On the other hand, there are many low level managers with teams of fewer than 10 people who can be very valuable and hard to replace. People with deep expertise in the specific area they work on.
Measuring a manager by their headcount is just a lazy way to evaluate impact and calculate salary.
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.
Yes that's what my comment was. Often it's 100 people below them. The % of time managing any of these people is low.
FYI twitter seems to be moving to a low manager high employee count. Musk himself said that a ratio of 1 manager per 10 coders is way too high. I suspect he wants it at 10x that amounts.
My current manager has 31 direct reports.
Sorry if this is confusing it's a hard subject to describe over text and I think there is a lot of nuisance lost over text here.
Big companies definitely hire people -- at all levels -- who are completely irrelevant. Managers have a big incentive to hire more people because they will then have more direct reports. Directors want more managers. VP's want more directors, etc...
I was on a small team at a big company in 1998. Due to recent mergers there were duplicated teams across the company. A big initiative came out that our team was in line to respond to. We (about 10 of us) put together a highly functional prototype in a couple months, put it forward showing we could take it on. Another team went out and hired 200 people and had no other presentation than an org structure. They won, and I learned a lesson.
I'm mostly talking about smaller companies where the EM is the team lead.
A lot of these companies have bloated managerial structures, even in smaller orgs... You didn't see this 10 to 15 years ago. It disgusts me when I go to a meeting, and there's literally 10 people on the call, only 3 of which actually do any direct work on the project.
Most folks (certainly not all!) at the Director level and higher by definition spend their entire day talking about work other people are doing rather than doing it themselves. It's the nature of the beast, especially if you operate with a manager only having one or two small (3-6) person teams to manage. You can get a flatter org chart where managers have 15 or 20 direct reports, which makes it impossible for the manager to both be a good manager and GSD, or you can have managers who still GSD but you have so many of them you start to add layers so that the C-level can still do what they need to (get investment, or drive revenue, or strategic partnerships or whatever depending on your scale/stage).
It's depressingly easy to end up in a situation where the line employees are overworked and underpaid, the first level managers are stressed out trying to really manage well their half-dozen direct reports while still producing work themselves, and the Directors and VPs end up passing reports back and forth all day, every day.
Some directors may have dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands, of people under them directly or indirectly. This rapidly grows beyond the scale where the director can jump in for anyone in the tree beneath them.
Your comment probably applies for a team lead with a half dozen IC reports. Add in one other layer (i.e., a half dozen team lead reports) and it might still apply in some cases. But double that number or add in another layer and things are probably far beyond the scale you were imagining. The manager’s job now requires a vastly different toolset that most developers know nothing about, have no experience with, and generally wouldn’t even know how to think about.
An observation from my work experience is that, while things run efficiently with smaller teams overall, small teams also tend to make it easier for any given leader to have a reasonably good idea what's going on across their org (it's easier to grok a 50 person team's work when it's split into 10 mgr teams than if it were completely flat), but that also puts the lower level managers' jobs at risk because their director is more likely not to consider them essential -- ironically, because things are running smoothly.
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