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.)
> 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).
Wait, so you have ICs who work on multiple projects, and report to a different manager depending on the project? That sounds like a nightmare. Having one manager to manage is usually enough work...
levels.fyi doesn't appear to use the term "Technical Lead". There is "Technical Program Manager" and "Technical Account Manager" that sound like they'd be similar (someone technical transitioning into a full-time non-technical role). And then roles such as "Product Manager" and "Program Manager" seemingly for those who are currently 100% non-technical in their work.
Does the change mean the most competent solution architect who has successfully designed and implemented many complex systems from scratch is capped in salary package because they're not doing the important job of demanding those around them fill out TPS reports all day?
TLM role has always sounded like a trap to me, I would never say yes to it personally. I’m sure it’s sold as an expected 50% code, 50% management but everyone I’ve talked to who has been near it says the expectation is more like 80% code 80% management.
TLM roles are a trap, but not in that sense. There's no expectation that you do two jobs at once.
It's just a way to ease unsuspecting engineers into management. If you don't suck at management, your team inevitably grows (or you're handed over other teams), and before long, you're managing full-time.
Which means that there are three type of people who remain TLMs in the long haul: those who suck at management; those managing dead-end projects on dead-end teams; or those who desperately cling on to the engineering past and actively refuse to take on more people. From a corporate point of view, none of these situations are great, hence the recent pushback against TLM roles in the industry.
This has largely been my experience in TLM roles. You’re a staff/principal level engineer so people still expect outputs from you. However, you now have the job of managing your teams’ impact and outcomes as well.
Impact and outcomes are far more important than outputs, so it makes sense to for you to spend a lot of time on that. But, when performing review time comes around, you’re still bounded by hard metrics around outputs.
TLM is fine. TPM is the awkward one. I don't understand what hierarchy (if any) there is to TPMs, they kinda float around and ask people to do stuff. Some projects get passed around to different TPMs like hot potato. The skilled TPMs stick around and make things happen, but even then idk how that works because they lead people without having any actual reports.
But were all the other managers in the team in a TLM role?
The problem I foresee here is, there would be escalation meetings and all the non-technical managers would sit back and point fingers at the TLMs until they leave.
It sounds to me like Google is moving to a more typical "technical lead" model where leads have substantial authority and some mentorship responsibilities, but they're essentially an IC and someone else up the chain actually handles proper management. Informally, tech leads can gently chew out less senior devs, but if someone actually needs to be disciplined then the lead needs to talk to the manager.
TLM is an odd role. I understand big tech companies have their own culture but it does seem like a poor management strategy regardless of efficiency.
The original ethos was that you didn't want the company ran by MBAs, so you wanted to build your management team by tapping into talented engineers.
Of course, this can backfire in many ways. You end up wasting engineering talent, and as the organization grows, managers spend more time on paper-pushing than on creative work. And there's no shortage of engineers who are just bad at reading, talking to, and managing people.
But the huge perk of management is leverage. If you're technically competent and credible, and want something to happen, your team will see it your way. If you're a random "ideas guy" in an IC role, that's not a given.
By make-up I think most TLs at Google had no reports even before this change. The idea of ICs in leadership has always been a common occurrence at Google. If anything I don't really see it as commonly outside of Google.
Yeah, that helps put this in perspective. At first the headline sounded like a somewhat jarring and sudden staff cut, but if we're essentially just seeing Google migrate TLMs to TLs, that actually makes sense.
we had this in my company it was pretty hit miss. Almost always the 'TLM' was someone who was in the role for a really long time and it warranted a second person, so it ended up being a 1-2 junior reporting in absorbing the knowledge that the tlm had.
If you were in a growing domain, and the TLM stayed engaged with the code it worked really well, but as soon as one of those failed it was a bad roi for the company and a pretty terrible experience for everyone. the juniors were never getting promoted since there was only room for 1 expert on the small domain. The TLM was just chilling getting 5-10% raises a year without going outside of their little kingdom, but making sure their domain worked well.
As their junior got better they coded less but their juniors couldn't grow as long as they were there because the niche didn't need that many people.
I don't think its a coincidence that all these companies eliminated these rolls after 2022. When you have unlimited money and massive headcount growth these roles can exist and give your good but not exceptional people room for career growth. At static headcount, you basically need to do what banks do -- yearly cuts or no one can be promoted or hired.
I wouldn't actually say that, but I would say that the TLM role works at a very specific stage in a company's lifecycle, and many companies that use it (including Google itself from around 2010 onwards) have long since past that point.
IMHO, the conditions where a TLM role is appropriate are:
1.) You need to be in the company growth phase where you are still trying to capture share of a competitive market, i.e. it matters that you can execute quickly and correctly.
2.) There needs to be significant ambiguity in the technical projects you take on. TLMs should be determining software architecture, not fitting their teams' work into an existing architecture.
3.) No more than 3 levels of management between engineer and person who has ultimate responsibility for business goals, and no more than 6 reports per manager. The mathematically inclined will note that this caps org size at 6^3 = 216, which perhaps not coincidentally, is not much larger than Dunbar's number.
4.) TLMs need to be carefully chosen for teamwork. They need to think of themselves as servant-leaders that clarify engineering goals for the teammates who work with themselves, not as ladder-climbers who tell others what to do.
Without these, there is a.) not enough scope for the feedback advantages of the TLM structure to matter and b.) too much interference from managers outside the team for the TLM to keep up with their managerial duties. But if these conditions are met, IMHO teams of TLMs are the only way to effectively develop software quickly.
Perhaps not coincidentally, these conditions usually coincide with the growth phase of most startups where much of the value is actually created.
This kinda brings up a question I've often thought about. Why is it that we structure growth in a company to be so biased towards moving into management roles?
I mean there is the obvious part of the answer in that managers are the ones that are given the power to define that growth ladder, but I'm not sure this fully explains things. If people are transferring from technical positions to managerial positions then should they also not be aware that there is a lot of advantages to allowing people to keep climbing the ladder through technical positions? That institutional knowledge can be incredibly valuable. It's often what leads to those people being such wizards. They've been with the code for so long that they know where things will fail and what are the best parts to jump in to make modifications (and where not to!). But every time you transfer one of these people to a non-technical role that knowledge "rots". More in that code just keeps evolving while their knowledge of it remains mostly frozen.
Which what you say sounds like maybe the worse end of that. Taking that person with institutionalized knowledge and hyper focusing their capabilities on one aspect. That doesn't sound like an efficient use of that person. Though the knowledge transfer part sounds important for a company's long term success, but also not helpful if it's narrowly applied.
Not at Google but I'm in such a role right now and I really dislike it. Can't really get much focused coding in because you constantly have to jump in to review something or help fix something or handle a live site juniors cannot handle, or update some TPS report on what everyone is doing, or some PowerPoint or whatever. I dislike all of these to start with, but getting my own (expected) features in is an exercise in frustration. And when I ignore people and try to have uninterrupted time it feels like I'm neglecting all this other stuff. I wonder who thrives in such a mixed role...
I think this is a good thing. Every time I've seen people in dual tech/management roles at any company, they've always been incredibly stressed about their job, and always have way too much to do.
I've also never really liked the idea of engineering managers who are technical enough to approve/veto tech decisions that team members make, since there's a power imbalance there. Even if your TLM is pushing a bad technology choice, you might not want to push back too hard because they're also responsible for your performance review and comp changes and whatnot.
>always been incredibly stressed about their job, and always have way too much to do.
So, no different from any other dedicate IC or manager at these companies?
>I've also never really liked the idea of engineering managers who are technical enough to approve/veto tech decisions that team members make, since there's a power imbalance there.
How is this different from any other manager or higher up making decisions? If your boss or boss's boss really wants something and you're not in a good market, it's never a good time to poke your head out.
> It’s part of an effort to have dedicated managers and dedicated engineers instead of hybrid roles.
The hybrid role idea has always been ridiculous. It's two different jobs, like being a mechanic and an accountant. Do you need a mechanic? Cool, hire a mechanic. Do you only need a mechanic part-time? Cool, hire a part-time mechanic. But I don't want my mechanic stopping and starting the work on my engine 3 times a day because somebody has tax questions.
The whole point behind the division of labor is to specialize, and get really good at your specialization. Picking up multiple very different jobs and trying to do both is the opposite of efficiency. People knew this 250 years ago.
TLM role was both the best and worst role in tech.
Best in that the TLM generally has complete control over the product execution (and can commonly bulldoze the PM). It's amazing if you have a solid vision of what you want and you want to get it done.
Worst in that the workload can be intense as the team grows.
I was a TL and then a TLM in my org, and am now an EM. I'm actually pretty happy about it, personally. I am organizing an eng summit tomorrow between my team and a sibling team (which is onsite and visiting from elsewhere) in my org, and I noticed that about 18 months ago, I would have been the person to give 4 out of the 5 main talks at the summit (as the expert / TL on that system). Now it's five different eng. This tells me I've been able to nurture / elevate the other engineers on the team, get them all into technical leadership roles, and then have them reach out and be ready to talk about their work to other teams.
Overall: this is a good thing. By taking up less room on the technical side, I've replaced one of me with four strong engineers. Previously, I was split between TL work and EM work and as a result, did a half job of each, leaving too much un-done.
The other thing I'll note is that engineers are basically the only role with this distinction. Product Managers, Program Managers, Sales, Marketing, all those roles seem to combine management with seniority. Only on the engineering side do we have both a TL and Manager hierarchy (while typically the TLs for a team report to the same manager that the line manager for the team does, they exert authority differently). This works out okay on the eng side when there is a strong alliance between the TLs and the EMs, but that doesn't always happen.
> This was called the TLM role at google. Technical Lead/Manager. You were expected to code and manage a couple of more junior engineers.
Ohhhh this explains so much. My career is pretty much entirely at b tier companies who try to implement what faangs/mag7 type companies do but always fuck it up because they don’t understand the fundamentals or are unwilling to part with any of amount of power or money even if they got more after all was said and done.
Anyways post covid all of a sudden every company was expecting me as part of the Software Engineering Manager roles I was getting, to have 7-10 direct reports, do 30 hours of project management per week, _and_ simultaneously be better versed in every single project my direct reports were working on or at least be the initial architect for the project.
I just ignored it and kept my people productive since that was an impossible ask of me, and for 5ish years that was good enough for companies but I guess if the faangs are wiping that role clean I better switch career niche again
A recruiter in India was talking to me about some roles for some time and then disappeared. After a few weeks, when I was ready for interviews, I reached back. I was informed that those roles didn't exist anymore. I enquired further asking wahether those roles were filled, and the reply was something on the lines that no, they didn't exist anymore. Bit of a bummer because Google was one of the very few companies here that actually interviewed you pretty fairly even after a considerable employment gap. Those were L7 roles (not sure whether those are around TLM).
Not OP, but I think TLM works best when it's a transitional role. You have someone you want to groom into a full-time manager, and you have a team that you plan to grow over time. TLM itself is not that efficient, but can lead to strong full-time managers who understand the team really well and had time to grow into the role.
It's a rather awkward role as you have to carve out a maker's schedule within a manager's schedule [1]. As others have mentioned, it only makes sense as the person ramps up for full management or decides against that career path.
The value of that kind of role is that the person interfacing with the bureaucracy and the business hierarchy and its many demands also actually does the technical work and knows things about what they are working on.
Without it, nobody on the management side of things actually writes any code, or has first-hand experience with working on the product. The line managers just end up as a go-between between the workers and their directors, because they only know what their reports tell them. They don't know much for themselves.
You can't quantify this sort of loss on an earnings report, but among many other things, it does a great job of diluting ownership of the product away from the teams working on it.
Former TLM that was involuntarily reclassified as an EM because I had too many reports. I'm from old-line (pre-2011) Google, so was an engineer back when the TLM role was one of our unique competitive advantages.
I have a lot of thoughts on this. IMHO, it's appropriate for the state that Google is in now, where it is a large mature conglomerate, basically finance & managerially driven, built around optimizing 10-K reports and exec headcount & control. It's not a particularly good move from the perspective of shipping great software, but Google doesn't really do that anymore.
The reason is because software construction and management is unintuitive, and concrete details of implementation very often bubble up into the architecture, team structure, and project assignments required to build the software. TLM-led teams have a very tight feedback loop between engineering realities and managerial decisions. Your manager is sitting beside you in the trenches, they are writing code, and when something goes wrong, they know exactly what and why and can adopt the plan appropriately. Most importantly, they can feed that knowledge of the codebase into the new plan. So you end up with a team structure that actually reflects how the codebase works, engineers with deep expertise in their area that can quickly make changes, and management that is nimble enough to adopt the organization to engineering realities rather than trying to shoehorn engineering realities into the existing org structure.
Now, as an EM with 10+ reports, I'm too far removed from the technical details to do anything other than rely on what my reports tell me. My job is to take a slide deck from a PM with 10 gripes about our current product, parcel it out into 10 projects for 10 engineers, and then keep them happy and productive while they go implement the mock. It will take them forever because our codebase is complex, and they will heroically reproduce the mock (but only the mock, because there is little room for judgment calls in say resize behavior or interactivity or interactions with other features and nobody's holding them accountable for things that management didn't have time or bandwidth to ask for) with some hideously contorted code that make the codebase even more complex but is the best they can do because the person who actually needed to rewrite their code to make it simple reports up through a different VP. But that's okay, because the level of management above me doesn't have time to check the technical details either, and likewise for the level of management above them, and if it takes forever we can just request more headcount to deal with the lack of velocity. Not our money, and it's really our only means of professional advancement now that product quality is impossible and doesn't matter anyway.
Ultimately the value of the TLM role was in that tight bidirectional feedback between code, engineers, and management. As a TLM, you can make org-structure decisions based on what the code tells you. As an EM, you make org-structure decisions based on what your manager tells you. But at some point in a company's lifetime, the code becomes irrelevant - nobody reads it all anyway - and the only thing that matters is your manager's opinion, and by transitivity, your VP's opinion. A flattened org structure with as many reports per manager as possible is a way for the VP to exert maximal control over the largest possible organization, mathematically, and so once that is all that matters, that is the structure you get.
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.
I can't say for Google, but at work it's more or less how it works at the office (mostly software dev, half a team does some firmware/hardware), but it's more ad-hoc than as a rule. Like all the teams are small, all the TLM equivalents started as devs before being promoted to their management position, so they have time to do some technical work; how much and what technical work depends on the team, some are still directly contributing to the team's products, others are more on (technical) ancillary tasks, which can be interrupted by management questions with less impact on the development.
I find that it works well, the TLM keep a foot in the action, so to speak and has a better idea of what's happening with the product being developed, what issues we're facing (also in terms of tools, environments...) and it keeps their knowledge of the product more up to date. Of course with their background, I wouldn't say they are all the greatest at managing, but I don't think they've ever done big mistake on that side of their role. So in short in our case it works, but it could just be a consequence of the local organisation and people working there.
speaking from personal experience, it's not that good to have TLM as your manager because in some ways you're competing with your manager on technical scope, and you'll lose
I think the idea of a leader on the line makes alot of sense. Someone should represent the work and be able to navigate the hierarchy. These types of roles always exist informally anyway.
There’s always a downside to anything, and the merits/demerits are all about the politics of the org.
I'm essentially in a TLM position currently. We're a small company, with a small codebase. I oversee three junior to mid-level developers, and I represent the team in our product/roadmap planning process. I also write a lot of code, review a lot of code, and make a lot of architectural decisions. At our current scale, and with our current resources, I think it works pretty well. Moving fast is one of our biggest priorities, and having a TLM definitely reduces overhead versus a more traditional separation of responsibilities.
I really never intended to have a management position, but this has been an incredible opportunity to experience a portion of it without fully committing. Other replies have described this as a transitional role, and I don't think they're wrong. In the long term, especially if the company grows, I can probably be more valuable by committing to one path or the other. However, for the right person and situation, I could see us minting a TLM again, regardless of size.
Doesn’t work when headcount stagnates because the teams never grow to full teams and the junior reporting engineers eventually become peers in a too small team.
Simple as that. It’s fine during times of growth but that’s not happening right now.
We did something like this but called it a different name. It was absolute garbage. Its really no surprise to see those roles move back to a more traditional alignment.
First they laid off the non-technical employees. As a big tech company, Google needs to focus on coding. But that wasn't enough, so they laid off the middle managers in charge of coders. As a big tech company, Google needs to focus on coding. But that wasn't enough, so they laid off the low-level managers who were the domain experts on each product. As a big tech company, Google needs to focus on pure coding, and anyone who isn't doing 100% coding is extraneous. But, that won't be good enough, so next they'll lay off the senior engineers. As a big tech company, Google needs to focus on coding, and senior engineers spend too much time doing "architecture" (whatever that means). But that won't be enough, either. So they'll lay off the regular engineers, too. As a big tech company, Google needs to focus on only the purest coders, meaning junior engineers who don't actually understand the product (understanding the product considered harmful). But that won't be enough. So they'll lay off all of the juniors and only keep one guy named Greg who will adopt the title "webmaster of google dot com" and rewrite the whole thing in PHP. Then this big tech company can really prosper!
Having worked in organisations of various sizes, my observation is that the network effects issue rings true, and large companies feel horrendously bureaucratic.
I had one Engineering Manager joke that his year at Volvo Cars had been one long meeting. Even the then-CEO at the time complained about the number of meetings the company held.
I also remember a tale from a colleague in a startup that had come from a much bigger company talking about how colleagues in India were asking for promotions or pay raises every year. Why? It turned out the colleagues in India had strong expectations from their parents to consistently be progressing in their career, hence they had to show progress in the form of being promoted or having increased salary.
What did the company do? They started creating job titles to essentially create the impression of being promoted without much changing in terms of the day to day job.
It seems like a kind of inflationary effect on organisation structures, where you solve one issue but potentially create other issues, namely bureaucracy.
The 35% reduction refers to the number of managers who oversee fewer than three people, according to a person familiar with the matter.
If you oversee 0-2 people, in most cases that’s probably not an efficient ratio. How did Google get so many folks in that position in the first place? And I assume the other 65% take up the slack to fluff their teams? Or what? Leave the other 65% managing 0-2 people?
For a team that size, you would assume the manager is only spending around half of their time on people management and probably around half their time working directly on whatever the team does. It can be a good arrangement if the goal is just to give a little more leverage to the manager, but it's also equally possible that the manager doesn't have time to do anything particularly well. Also, a lot of time a part-time line manager like that won't have enough organizational clout to look out properly for the team.
Having tried that arrangement a few times, I think it's better to have small pods where everyone is an engineer and then all the pods report up to a dedicated people manager.
From my experience: re-orgs and limiting backfills for attrition can lead to these awkward states. Someone starts off with a sensible number of directs, but it can devolve over time.
IMO, overseeing 0 people is great. I'm not likely to take any position where I have to oversee more or less than that; although I'm willing to compromise and oversee one person where they're actually independent and I don't have to do much overseeing.
Overseeing 0 people is great if your role is an individual contributor. If your role is a manager and there is no one for you to manage, it would seem that your role is redundant.
When I started, I was told that one of the easier ways to get promo at L5 was to become a manager. I don't know how true that was at the time, but I think this could be a consequence of that sort of local optimizing. I think now they don't even allow you to be a manager at L5 unless you're grandfathered in?
Search and ads, at least, had the L6 requirement for manager going back as long as I’m aware. I was under the impression that the requirement was relaxed at some point in some of the less revenue critical orgs, but that the L6 restriction actually goes back a long way.
Sometimes there are products where 1-3 people is the right size of team for that product; letting a team that size exist can be better than trying to smush together two or three unrelated products to fit a bigger team. Per other comments these are TLM positions where the manager is also expected to contribute technically.
Not a Goolger but my experience is that this is usually an optimistic promotion where someone is made a manager with the expectation of growing headcount later. But later never happens, or coincides with turnover to the degree that they never bubble up to a decent span of control.
The article says they were converted to ICs so these were TLMs or similar people. It sounds like the headline is clickbait and what's really been eliminated is small teams.
In some circumstances it can be an effective way to lose efficiency in exchange for velocity- basically there are large tasks that can’t be developed by a team any faster than by an individual ( mythical man month) because they are fundamentally sequential not parallel. In these cases there are often parallel subtasks, so you can buy some speed by having one individual forging ahead as if they are the only one on the project, and then rope in the team for parallelizable subtasks. Instead of any amount of decision-making or communication overhead, everyone jumps when the team lead says jump – this is the step that bounds performance to not be slower than a solo project.
Being the team lead in this sort of structure is grand fun, of course, but being a team member is brutal on the ego, and requires enormous skill to be a boost to velocity instead of a drag. Thus, it requires ridiculous compensation, even if you’re mostly sitting idle when the project is in a serial phase. it’s the sort of play that I could believe 2012 google could profitably execute and 2025 Google can’t.
Fewer than 3 people? That almost never makes sense. Right on Google to sort that out but I’d have a lot of questions for whatever leaders allowed such nonsense to develop on their watch in the first place.
Also 35% is way too low if it’s really less than three. Should be more like eliminating 95% of those scenarios.
It’s that semi role of being a “manager” while still writing code. They’re just doing away with that role and having dedicated people managers and dedicated engineers.
In certain types of company, it's workers without management responsibilities who do the work that brings in the money.
Think of a delivery company, for example, where drivers make deliveries, which is what the company gets paid for. Too many managers - AKA too few employees per manager - will sink the company, because managers draw a salary but don't make deliveries.
Of course, this analysis might not work as well for a company like Google. I'm pretty sure I can publish an ad without any human intervention on Google's end, so maybe they have no equivalent to the drivers, making the ratio incalculable.
I guess it depends on what other responsibilities the manager has. If a manager has too little to do, they might over-manage their small team, constantly checking in on their work, which is inefficient and demoralising.
Im convinced the big tech firms are so overly bloated simply because they do not possess high-quality leadership at the top who are able to clearly distill a vision of where they want their sub-ordinates to go.
That's not to say it's easy - its absolutely not. But Apple is living off of Steve Job's visionary prowess and continues to do so.
I agree. What's worse is, the upper layer and middle layers of management are filled with bozo's looking out for their own interests and have no desire to find those with potential and hone them.
Business school is a terrible proxy for future business leaders.
It boggles the mind how these firms have bloated to the size they have - it's the cost of ill-disciplined management from the top.
Around 5 is the correct number for a first line manager of a technical team. Go to 10 and it’s impossible to keep track of things. The day has only so many hours. Managing takes time.
For bigger teams (10+) you either need individuals who are very independent and driven, or have dependable line managers.
> 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.
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.
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.
Every time I see manager with 5 people I know it will be daily 30m standups, friday “summary” meeting, weekly 1:1 and other nok work related activities. If team of 5 people need a babysitter fulltime it means there are no adults on that group.
No, 5 is about ideal. If you are micromanaging with that many people on your team then you are neglecting other aspects of being a manager. More than about 7 and you start being unavailable to your team when they need you, and won't have time to do the planning and process tasks.
> For bigger teams (10+) you either need individuals who are very independent and driven, or have dependable line managers.
that described internal Apple hardware teams i was on for years, as having as flat as possible an org was a priority to prevent bureaucracy and fiefdom forming middle manager nonsense
That's been the mantra in the tech world for at least a decade now, and I've grown to really disagree. Managers should have 10 at minimum. Most should have 15-20. They should specialize in being a manager and shouldn't be solving problems except pure management problems. (Good) teachers easily manage classrooms of 10-30 kids, even in private schools. The low direct report count ends up creating managers that have too much power, too much say, and too much time to mess around.
I've never directly reported to someone who had that few people reporting to them. Team sizes of ~5 work well but managers can have multiple teams. They don't need to be involved with most people on a day to day basis.
Lol I went through a few FAANG Pm interviews for the lols.
Ah trust me - its actually insane how every firm manages to pull this off - the secret sauce that made the company what it was evaporates and the management optimise for process.
Readit News
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.
In those last 3 years I've only seen TLMs used to assist an overloaded EM.
The pattern I've seen is something like:
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.)
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).
Principal EM - USD$1.3m/yr per https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...
Staff EM - USD$664k/yr per https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...
Staff IC - USD$557k/yr per https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...
Senior IC - USD$410k/yr per https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...
Mid IC - USD$290k/yr per https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...
levels.fyi doesn't appear to use the term "Technical Lead". There is "Technical Program Manager" and "Technical Account Manager" that sound like they'd be similar (someone technical transitioning into a full-time non-technical role). And then roles such as "Product Manager" and "Program Manager" seemingly for those who are currently 100% non-technical in their work.
Does the change mean the most competent solution architect who has successfully designed and implemented many complex systems from scratch is capped in salary package because they're not doing the important job of demanding those around them fill out TPS reports all day?
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...
It's just a way to ease unsuspecting engineers into management. If you don't suck at management, your team inevitably grows (or you're handed over other teams), and before long, you're managing full-time.
Which means that there are three type of people who remain TLMs in the long haul: those who suck at management; those managing dead-end projects on dead-end teams; or those who desperately cling on to the engineering past and actively refuse to take on more people. From a corporate point of view, none of these situations are great, hence the recent pushback against TLM roles in the industry.
Impact and outcomes are far more important than outputs, so it makes sense to for you to spend a lot of time on that. But, when performing review time comes around, you’re still bounded by hard metrics around outputs.
(1) As an engineer, I prefer to be managed and guided by someone who actually knows what I work on, preferably better than I know it.
(2) A manager who actually understands the tech is often better at unblocking the team.
(3) Since senior IC openings tend to grow very thin as you become older, TLM path might be a viable career path for at least some.
Can this role work if we don't expect IC output from the TLM beyond what they themselves take on for their own satisfaction and growth?
The problem I foresee here is, there would be escalation meetings and all the non-technical managers would sit back and point fingers at the TLMs until they leave.
TLM is an odd role. I understand big tech companies have their own culture but it does seem like a poor management strategy regardless of efficiency.
Of course, this can backfire in many ways. You end up wasting engineering talent, and as the organization grows, managers spend more time on paper-pushing than on creative work. And there's no shortage of engineers who are just bad at reading, talking to, and managing people.
But the huge perk of management is leverage. If you're technically competent and credible, and want something to happen, your team will see it your way. If you're a random "ideas guy" in an IC role, that's not a given.
If you were in a growing domain, and the TLM stayed engaged with the code it worked really well, but as soon as one of those failed it was a bad roi for the company and a pretty terrible experience for everyone. the juniors were never getting promoted since there was only room for 1 expert on the small domain. The TLM was just chilling getting 5-10% raises a year without going outside of their little kingdom, but making sure their domain worked well.
As their junior got better they coded less but their juniors couldn't grow as long as they were there because the niche didn't need that many people.
I don't think its a coincidence that all these companies eliminated these rolls after 2022. When you have unlimited money and massive headcount growth these roles can exist and give your good but not exceptional people room for career growth. At static headcount, you basically need to do what banks do -- yearly cuts or no one can be promoted or hired.
IMHO, the conditions where a TLM role is appropriate are:
1.) You need to be in the company growth phase where you are still trying to capture share of a competitive market, i.e. it matters that you can execute quickly and correctly.
2.) There needs to be significant ambiguity in the technical projects you take on. TLMs should be determining software architecture, not fitting their teams' work into an existing architecture.
3.) No more than 3 levels of management between engineer and person who has ultimate responsibility for business goals, and no more than 6 reports per manager. The mathematically inclined will note that this caps org size at 6^3 = 216, which perhaps not coincidentally, is not much larger than Dunbar's number.
4.) TLMs need to be carefully chosen for teamwork. They need to think of themselves as servant-leaders that clarify engineering goals for the teammates who work with themselves, not as ladder-climbers who tell others what to do.
Without these, there is a.) not enough scope for the feedback advantages of the TLM structure to matter and b.) too much interference from managers outside the team for the TLM to keep up with their managerial duties. But if these conditions are met, IMHO teams of TLMs are the only way to effectively develop software quickly.
Perhaps not coincidentally, these conditions usually coincide with the growth phase of most startups where much of the value is actually created.
I mean there is the obvious part of the answer in that managers are the ones that are given the power to define that growth ladder, but I'm not sure this fully explains things. If people are transferring from technical positions to managerial positions then should they also not be aware that there is a lot of advantages to allowing people to keep climbing the ladder through technical positions? That institutional knowledge can be incredibly valuable. It's often what leads to those people being such wizards. They've been with the code for so long that they know where things will fail and what are the best parts to jump in to make modifications (and where not to!). But every time you transfer one of these people to a non-technical role that knowledge "rots". More in that code just keeps evolving while their knowledge of it remains mostly frozen.
Which what you say sounds like maybe the worse end of that. Taking that person with institutionalized knowledge and hyper focusing their capabilities on one aspect. That doesn't sound like an efficient use of that person. Though the knowledge transfer part sounds important for a company's long term success, but also not helpful if it's narrowly applied.
I've also never really liked the idea of engineering managers who are technical enough to approve/veto tech decisions that team members make, since there's a power imbalance there. Even if your TLM is pushing a bad technology choice, you might not want to push back too hard because they're also responsible for your performance review and comp changes and whatnot.
So, no different from any other dedicate IC or manager at these companies?
>I've also never really liked the idea of engineering managers who are technical enough to approve/veto tech decisions that team members make, since there's a power imbalance there.
How is this different from any other manager or higher up making decisions? If your boss or boss's boss really wants something and you're not in a good market, it's never a good time to poke your head out.
What I really love about it is the leverage. In a technical domain with a good core team it is almost like running your small company.
The hybrid role idea has always been ridiculous. It's two different jobs, like being a mechanic and an accountant. Do you need a mechanic? Cool, hire a mechanic. Do you only need a mechanic part-time? Cool, hire a part-time mechanic. But I don't want my mechanic stopping and starting the work on my engine 3 times a day because somebody has tax questions.
The whole point behind the division of labor is to specialize, and get really good at your specialization. Picking up multiple very different jobs and trying to do both is the opposite of efficiency. People knew this 250 years ago.
Best in that the TLM generally has complete control over the product execution (and can commonly bulldoze the PM). It's amazing if you have a solid vision of what you want and you want to get it done.
Worst in that the workload can be intense as the team grows.
Overall: this is a good thing. By taking up less room on the technical side, I've replaced one of me with four strong engineers. Previously, I was split between TL work and EM work and as a result, did a half job of each, leaving too much un-done.
The other thing I'll note is that engineers are basically the only role with this distinction. Product Managers, Program Managers, Sales, Marketing, all those roles seem to combine management with seniority. Only on the engineering side do we have both a TL and Manager hierarchy (while typically the TLs for a team report to the same manager that the line manager for the team does, they exert authority differently). This works out okay on the eng side when there is a strong alliance between the TLs and the EMs, but that doesn't always happen.
Ohhhh this explains so much. My career is pretty much entirely at b tier companies who try to implement what faangs/mag7 type companies do but always fuck it up because they don’t understand the fundamentals or are unwilling to part with any of amount of power or money even if they got more after all was said and done.
Anyways post covid all of a sudden every company was expecting me as part of the Software Engineering Manager roles I was getting, to have 7-10 direct reports, do 30 hours of project management per week, _and_ simultaneously be better versed in every single project my direct reports were working on or at least be the initial architect for the project.
I just ignored it and kept my people productive since that was an impossible ask of me, and for 5ish years that was good enough for companies but I guess if the faangs are wiping that role clean I better switch career niche again
[1] https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
Without it, nobody on the management side of things actually writes any code, or has first-hand experience with working on the product. The line managers just end up as a go-between between the workers and their directors, because they only know what their reports tell them. They don't know much for themselves.
You can't quantify this sort of loss on an earnings report, but among many other things, it does a great job of diluting ownership of the product away from the teams working on it.
I have a lot of thoughts on this. IMHO, it's appropriate for the state that Google is in now, where it is a large mature conglomerate, basically finance & managerially driven, built around optimizing 10-K reports and exec headcount & control. It's not a particularly good move from the perspective of shipping great software, but Google doesn't really do that anymore.
The reason is because software construction and management is unintuitive, and concrete details of implementation very often bubble up into the architecture, team structure, and project assignments required to build the software. TLM-led teams have a very tight feedback loop between engineering realities and managerial decisions. Your manager is sitting beside you in the trenches, they are writing code, and when something goes wrong, they know exactly what and why and can adopt the plan appropriately. Most importantly, they can feed that knowledge of the codebase into the new plan. So you end up with a team structure that actually reflects how the codebase works, engineers with deep expertise in their area that can quickly make changes, and management that is nimble enough to adopt the organization to engineering realities rather than trying to shoehorn engineering realities into the existing org structure.
Now, as an EM with 10+ reports, I'm too far removed from the technical details to do anything other than rely on what my reports tell me. My job is to take a slide deck from a PM with 10 gripes about our current product, parcel it out into 10 projects for 10 engineers, and then keep them happy and productive while they go implement the mock. It will take them forever because our codebase is complex, and they will heroically reproduce the mock (but only the mock, because there is little room for judgment calls in say resize behavior or interactivity or interactions with other features and nobody's holding them accountable for things that management didn't have time or bandwidth to ask for) with some hideously contorted code that make the codebase even more complex but is the best they can do because the person who actually needed to rewrite their code to make it simple reports up through a different VP. But that's okay, because the level of management above me doesn't have time to check the technical details either, and likewise for the level of management above them, and if it takes forever we can just request more headcount to deal with the lack of velocity. Not our money, and it's really our only means of professional advancement now that product quality is impossible and doesn't matter anyway.
Ultimately the value of the TLM role was in that tight bidirectional feedback between code, engineers, and management. As a TLM, you can make org-structure decisions based on what the code tells you. As an EM, you make org-structure decisions based on what your manager tells you. But at some point in a company's lifetime, the code becomes irrelevant - nobody reads it all anyway - and the only thing that matters is your manager's opinion, and by transitivity, your VP's opinion. A flattened org structure with as many reports per manager as possible is a way for the VP to exert maximal control over the largest possible organization, mathematically, and so once that is all that matters, that is the structure you get.
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.
I find that it works well, the TLM keep a foot in the action, so to speak and has a better idea of what's happening with the product being developed, what issues we're facing (also in terms of tools, environments...) and it keeps their knowledge of the product more up to date. Of course with their background, I wouldn't say they are all the greatest at managing, but I don't think they've ever done big mistake on that side of their role. So in short in our case it works, but it could just be a consequence of the local organisation and people working there.
I thought it was a nice stepping stone for people to learn management without having 10 people dumped on them. But it looked bad on paper.
There’s always a downside to anything, and the merits/demerits are all about the politics of the org.
I really never intended to have a management position, but this has been an incredible opportunity to experience a portion of it without fully committing. Other replies have described this as a transitional role, and I don't think they're wrong. In the long term, especially if the company grows, I can probably be more valuable by committing to one path or the other. However, for the right person and situation, I could see us minting a TLM again, regardless of size.
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Simple as that. It’s fine during times of growth but that’s not happening right now.
I had one Engineering Manager joke that his year at Volvo Cars had been one long meeting. Even the then-CEO at the time complained about the number of meetings the company held.
I also remember a tale from a colleague in a startup that had come from a much bigger company talking about how colleagues in India were asking for promotions or pay raises every year. Why? It turned out the colleagues in India had strong expectations from their parents to consistently be progressing in their career, hence they had to show progress in the form of being promoted or having increased salary.
What did the company do? They started creating job titles to essentially create the impression of being promoted without much changing in terms of the day to day job.
It seems like a kind of inflationary effect on organisation structures, where you solve one issue but potentially create other issues, namely bureaucracy.
If you oversee 0-2 people, in most cases that’s probably not an efficient ratio. How did Google get so many folks in that position in the first place? And I assume the other 65% take up the slack to fluff their teams? Or what? Leave the other 65% managing 0-2 people?
Having tried that arrangement a few times, I think it's better to have small pods where everyone is an engineer and then all the pods report up to a dedicated people manager.
I would have so many questions if I got an offer for a position where I had to oversee less than 0 people
It is awful, send help.
Being the team lead in this sort of structure is grand fun, of course, but being a team member is brutal on the ego, and requires enormous skill to be a boost to velocity instead of a drag. Thus, it requires ridiculous compensation, even if you’re mostly sitting idle when the project is in a serial phase. it’s the sort of play that I could believe 2012 google could profitably execute and 2025 Google can’t.
Also 35% is way too low if it’s really less than three. Should be more like eliminating 95% of those scenarios.
I don't think mature enterprise companies should have managers of 0-2 people though.
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Think of a delivery company, for example, where drivers make deliveries, which is what the company gets paid for. Too many managers - AKA too few employees per manager - will sink the company, because managers draw a salary but don't make deliveries.
Of course, this analysis might not work as well for a company like Google. I'm pretty sure I can publish an ad without any human intervention on Google's end, so maybe they have no equivalent to the drivers, making the ratio incalculable.
That's not to say it's easy - its absolutely not. But Apple is living off of Steve Job's visionary prowess and continues to do so.
Business school is a terrible proxy for future business leaders.
It boggles the mind how these firms have bloated to the size they have - it's the cost of ill-disciplined management from the top.
For bigger teams (10+) you either need individuals who are very independent and driven, or have dependable line managers.
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.
that described internal Apple hardware teams i was on for years, as having as flat as possible an org was a priority to prevent bureaucracy and fiefdom forming middle manager nonsense
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTuLbiIVDpk
Ah trust me - its actually insane how every firm manages to pull this off - the secret sauce that made the company what it was evaporates and the management optimise for process.