| ▲ | Aurornis 10 hours ago | |
I think dividing responsibilities across so many different managers has become too much of an anti-pattern for small and medium sized companies. The least productive tech companies I worked for in the past decade had a nearly 1:1 ratio of engineers to different manager types. Our teams of 3-4 engineers had to work with our engineering manager, a product manager, a project manager, and a program manager at minimum. If you did UI work you would work with another UI/UX manager. The minimum timespan to get anything done was measured in quarters. You could expect to have to spend more time scheduling meetings and following up with all your different managers by a factor of 10X or more than time spent doing anything related to code. Contrast this with another employer I had who was very clear about the fact that we were not a big tech company and we were not going to structure our teams like one. We kept team units small and made them work together as a unit, not a disparate collection of managers that had to be appeased. We shipped a lot and we shipped fast. We need to stop trying to use complicated and divided management structures everywhere. Companies with small teams and clearly unified management structures will always perform better than the management styles where responsibilities are divided across 5 different people and even basic work requires coordinating all of them through meetings | ||