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.

Do you have any opinion on the success/value of the TLM role?

This is a funny question to me, because my entire career (mostly small companies/small tech depts) I've never reported to an EM. It's only when I moved to big tech that EM-who-doesn't-code became a thing, and it took some adjustment for me. All prior roles had TLs (aka TLM) which led the team while being the expert - aka the "surgeon model" from Fred Brooks' book.

As far as I can tell, the main function of an EM is to enforce the company policy. I'm not sure there really is a need at a smaller place.

As someone who has worked in companies from <30 to >100k, I would say that what an EM does is more about communication. Think of a company with m employees as a m by m matrix, with a 1 where there regular communication and a 0 where there is no communication and a 0.5 for those hallway meetings which our CEO's assure us are why RTO is so important.

In a small company (let's say anything under Dunbar's Number), you have a very dense network organically, and EM's aren't necessary. As the company grows larger, the matrix becomes sparser and sparser- until you get to something like Google (180k employees plus maybe that many again contractors) and you have almost all 0's. So an EM's job is to solve the communication problem, because information still needs to flow around the company, in and out, whether it's "do this project" or "another team already solved this problem" or "this project is a never-ending world of pain and should be ended" to "employee 24601 is awesome and should be given more responsibility."

That's a large part of it.

Probably the best description I've heard of the EM role is that "It's a large collection of part-time roles, all with disparate skillsets, that together are responsible for ensuring the success of the project."

Communication is a huge part of that - downwards (telling reports the information they need to be successful), sideway (getting information from cross-functional partners and managerial peers so you align your projects with theirs), and upwards (managing expectations and asking for direction at the appropriate point so upper management doesn't freak out).

But other skillsets involved are: playing therapist (managing anxiety, morale issues, resentment, and misconduct); coaching (both technical and interpersonal); splitting up vague exec mandates into subgoals; prioritizing; hiring; managing performance; serving as a point of contact for whatever random problems your reports bring you; negotiating; setting team structure; developing expertise among your reports; managing their careers so they get promoted; ensuring that they're recognized for their accomplishments; helping people have fun in the office; modeling a culture of respect; selling new product initiatives; and yes, enforcing company policy.