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

> There's no expectation that you do two jobs at once.

I laughed out loud when I read this. I've never seen anyone at any company in a hybrid tech/manager role that wasn't expected to do two jobs at once. Or at least they felt like they were, which is still the same problem.

80% coding & 80% management for that role sounds about right.

I've been a TLM at two big companies and in my experience there was no expectation to do two jobs at once - I did majority of management with very very little hands on coding. More like frequent pair programming with more junior staff, code reviews etc. My last manager told me explicitly when I started - there is zero expectation on you to do any hands on work, you need to make sure your team performs and keeps going in the right direction first and foremost.

80 / 80 is sure close to reality.

As alternative explanation, even if there's no pressure to do so, the thing is these people came to do dev, and probably enjoyed their job enough to get recognized for their work.

So when asked to split between dev and management, outside of a few exceptions they'll want to do 80% of tech by choice. But the management part doesn't go away of course, so it will still be at least 50% (and 80% if they want money, because that's the part they're actually evaluated on)

Most work 40 to 50 hrs per week. Some places even a more extreme 60.

For this to be accurate, you're saying 160% aka 1.6 or 64 to 80 hrs per week, with 96hrs as the extreme?

I mean, 64 - 80 hours a week can be the expectation, and then it's just that almost nobody is living up to the expectation.

Anecdotally, a hybrid technical manager I had in the past worked 60 hours a week pretty much minimum. Which sucks.

Management requires a birds-eye view of the project in all its breadth, and quickly responding to issues, as well as reporting up (proactive stakeholder management). The job of the manager is to keep the CXOs happy (inform/manage expectations) whilst protecting their own team so they can focus on getting their work done with minimal disruption (isolate).

Coding requires the opposite, zooming deeply into the code and retaining focus. The job of the IC coder is to deliver (design and implement) beautiful and pragmatic architectures that do what is expected.

I recommend anyone to reject to fill roles where these two are combined into one. Note that this is not a comment about workload, but about irreconcileable differences. (The perfect candidates for each even match different personality profiles...)

I've been in engineering, TLM, and management roles in multiple companies. In terms of output, TLMs are not held to the same standard as full-time engineers at the same level, period. Their engineering contributions are dissected only if their performance as a manager is in serious doubt.

In any role, there are some folks who push themselves too hard, and there is no one to tell them "stop", but that's their choice.

This is true for EMs at my company. They are pretty heavily technical, with full manager responsibilities. I honestly always assumed that's what EMs were.