Typical ratio of people to managers in a company is about 1:4, so that tracks.
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.
Every time I see more than 10 direct reports, I think of this quote:
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
When I started my career it was pretty common to have a team of ~12 under one manager with a couple of TLs. Nowadays it's more like 1:4 or even 1:3 - that's 3x management bloat for mostly bureaucratic reasons and with no obvious improvement in productivity or retention. Then there's the thing you said - people with "manager/lead" in title but no obvious managerial responsibilities.
In many shops managers are now doing TLs work like designs and technical vision except they dont actually write any code. This goes about as well as one would expect…
> Typical ratio of people to managers in a company is about 1:4, so that tracks.
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.
Productivity tools don't help you when dealing with people problems. You can't throw a TODO app or some other bullshit on someone who is underperforming or to coach someone for a promotion.
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?
I do think all of these various kinds of managers - none with any actual clout, is part of the problem. It is although the structure is designed by employees for employees, not stakeholders.
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.