Google has eliminated 35% of managers overseeing small teams in past year

> Go to 10 and it’s impossible to keep track of things. The day has only so many hours. Managing takes time.

I've actually had better experiences with higher employee:manager ratios for this reason.

When the manager can't possibly be involved in everything they're forced to let go, delegate, and skip the management busywork.

My worst experiences have been at companies with one manager per 2-3 employees and skip-level managers who were expected to be involved as well. It was a never-ending stream of meetings, weekly hour-long 1:1s with multiple people, goal setting, personal development exercises, and a growing list of scheduled distractions.

The managers felt like they needed to make work to justify their managerial roles, so our time got filled with meetings and activities that didn't contribute to anything other than making the manager feel good about doing things they heard about in podcasts and books.

At that ratio a technical manager should be first on every code review, should be testing the hell out of everything, and should be sitting in design reviews catching bugs well before they hit the IC's plates.

With 2 reports one definitely has time for IC work. At 4-5 is where it gets tricky.

Same. With so few reports, those "managers" don't have much to do, so they invent nonsense and start aggravating the actual people doing the work. In one case, the guy was totally not receptive to my feedback about the performance issues of other team members. "I'll talk to him."... and literally did nothing. I was more experienced than everyone on the team, including the "manager." He's gone now.

This is my experience as well. I currently have two managers for a team of three people. One manager basically wants nothing to do with us, and the other wants hourly activity reports that I'm fairly certain he's never looked at.

That's an interesting perspective and not one I've heard before, but it resonates with me. Thanks