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

This was called the TLM role at google. Technical Lead/Manager. You were expected to code and manage a couple of more junior engineers.

It’s part of an effort to have dedicated managers and dedicated engineers instead of hybrid roles.

This is being sold as an efficiency win for the sake of the stock price but it’s really just moved a few people around with the TLMs now 100% focused on programming.

GOOG has made a systemic push to eliminate the role starting ~3 years ago. At that time my M was a staff level IC TLM with 4 reports who was forcibly converted to EM.

In those last 3 years I've only seen TLMs used to assist an overloaded EM.

The pattern I've seen is something like:

    Principal EM
    |- Staff EM (7 reports, project A)
    |- Staff EM (8 reports, project B)
    |- Staff IC (projects A, B, C)
    |- Senior IC (projects A, B)
    |- Senior IC (project C)
    |- Mid level IC (project C)
    |- Mid level IC (project C)

Maybe project C was just reorged under the Principal EM or maybe it's a speculative side project. But those last three are clearly clustered, there's no good line manager fit and the principal EM feels disconnected from the 2 mid level ICs. Project C is a bit of an island and projects A and B are taking up most of the EM's time.

So the Principal EM deputizes Senior IC on project C as a TLM until things have changed enough that there can be a dedicated EM. Eventually the TLM converts to EM, a new EM is brought in, or there's a reorg, etc.

Of the two times I saw saw it happen locally, both converted back to ICs after a year or two and noted that the role felt like being 70% IC and 70% EM.

Nowadays the TLM role doesn't exist so the principal would delegate most of the technical responsibilities of the M role, giving them nearly full control of project C, but would not give them a formal role. (I've been that senior IC for project C.)

(Edit for formatting.)

> At that time my M was a staff level IC TLM with 4 reports who was forcibly converted to EM.

I am obviously not disputing your experience, but wanted to mention that this was not the standard pattern. The standard pattern for forced conversion at L6 (Staff) was either 6 or 7 reports (I don't remember exactly).

> Principal EM

I don't want to be overly pedantic, but there's no Principal EM on Google eng ladders and so it's not entirely clear which level you're referring to.

The IC ladder runs Staff SWE (L6) - Senior Staff SWE (L7) - Principal SWE (L8) - Distinguished SWE (L9)

The Eng Manager ladder runs EM II (L6) - EM III (L7) - Director (L8) - Senior Director (L9)

P.S. I hope I got the EM II/III designations right. I think EM I is L5, though almost never seen in practice.

P.P.S. Confusingly, the IC ladder allows a limited number of reports (the limit increases with level).