Hey all, What do engineering managers do at companies like google and Facebook. How much time do they spend writing code daily. I review all the designs and review code, beyond that am not able to find time and slowly my coding skills are getting rusty. I have 15 direct reports. Am I being unrealistic or is it a norm.
Hey salesforce kooltime don’t you have tech leads in your team who can share your work for code review ?
15 is too many. You probably are developing blind spots right now
You should either layer your team, or spin off part of it. 15 direct is way too many to stay technically relevant and not become a bottleneck.
Agreed with Cisco, you need to build leads within your team to do the code review stuff. And 15 is way too much; you need a manager or two. What you need to spend time focusing on is vision, strategy, roadmap, execution. Management is a different field entirely. It’s ok and probably good to do small coding tasks here and there to stay grounded, but you will have to accept that your skills will diminish.
Alternatively, fb and google both have a tlm path for managers who want to stay technically relevant and advance based on technical skills. But we discourage having more than 8 reports for TLMs.
What is the typical number of reports for Manager at Uber? What are the different levels of Managers?
Even 8 should be high for TLM. How many direct reports hem for an EM in Facebook considered as not too high?
Norm. Except the 15 reports. That’s way too many. How do you get anything done? Sweet spot is 6-8.