My spouse both leads and manages ~24 direct reports, each of which require near continuous instruction, supervision, mentoring and encouragement. Her role demands an advanced degree with on-going education and certification requirements; exhaustive planning; an endless well of optimism; extensive individualized communication with third-party stake-holders; detailed performance accounting and reporting to stake-holders and management; frequent conflict resolution; incredible time and resources management; quick adaption to unexpected situations; acute safety awareness; and to operate in a highly-political environment with severe budget constraints.
She's a nationally board-certified kindergarten teacher in a public school.
This gave me a laugh. Very well written. And, good on your spouse for doing what she does. I was fortunate to have an excellent kindergarten teacher, and still think of her from time to time.
That depends heavily on the location (i.e. school district). Last time I looked at the school district budgets, school teachers where I live make, on average over $100k/yr plus health insurance and a sweet pension plan. The next town over, I think they make half that.
I live in a state where they pay is pretty decent starting around $50k a year (they should be making more, but still not a bad start). Also the state pays for pretty much all of your Masters degree. Their health insurance is top notch and their pension is solid. Lots of states really don’t care for public education.
Tenured positions, strong unions, pensions, benefits the average blue collared worker can dream of, and no accountability or pressures to ensure students make their marks. I can support raises once merit pay is instituted and they start doing something about the bad teachers, of which young me would say is the majority.
Tenured? We are talking kindergarten here. Also, are you seriously comparing an advanced-degree career to blue-collar workers?
How is it you'd institute a merit system? By the volume-of-students-per-hour, or what, exactly? The least complaining parents? Test scores that depend on parental involvement to be any good? How are disinterested or absentee parents or those parents who have it in for teachers accounted for in such a system?
The teachers union where I am is strong, but it doesn't preclude the administration from playing tricks similar to the exactly 39-hour "part time" employee. Specifically, the teachers get "fired" on the last day of the school year, and turn hired back in the fall, in some sort of adminstration-union rule avoiding shell game.
It's a wonder anyone wants to do the job at all, knowing all this in advance. I almost became a teacher once. Figured all the abuse would be a degrading waste of my efforts.
Yea - but maybe for such an important role for society we can actually put up the cash to make it a worthwhile career choice. I've heard the "we don't want teachers who are only in it for the cash" line enough that I want to puke. If you paid enough to attract the leeches legitimate teachers would get them sacked right quick.
Cool. But people need to eat and our society (at least in the US) is completely run via cash - you can appeal to higher ideals all you want, but if you're starving out teachers you're going to lose a lot of the good ones that can go into other fields of education and communication.
I think a lot of teachers do value the experience of teaching enough that they'll stick with it through thick and thin - but a lot of folks never even consider teaching due to just how poor the wages are.
It's not just about money. Ultimately, it's about respect. Considering the clearing price in a free market is good and all, but you have to consider there's a buyer representing real people, who determines the working condition of this group. And also a seller whose life will be made easier and more dignified if they're properly paid, which will in turn attract better and less desperate teachers.
When I say paid, I obviously also mean in intangible ways, such as having enough time to go to the toilet between classes. Or being insulated from being yelled at by parents and meekly saying sorry for telling off their particularly concentration-destroying kid.
If they were entirely not motivated by money, we could just have them do it for free. I think clearly teachers expect at least a little money, and perhaps many potential teachers would expect even more.
I think if we removed the need to earn money to get a decent living, we would have a lot of people teaching for free.
Most people are not motivated by money, they reluctantly accept that they need to earn a living, but it is not a big driver per se in most people I know.
In a lot of cases, they don't want to do the job. There are teacher shortages in a lot of the United States, especially in states that are infamous for mistreating teachers, like Texas.
That really surprised me when I moved up here - suddenly I lost a whole class of jokes about how underpaid teacher are. It shows too, you can look at things like IP creation (comedians, musicians, writers, performers) and even vaccination rates to see the benefits investing in education can get you.
Sorry to shit on your sacred cow, but you mean overpaid. For babysitting.
The education children get in public schools is abysmal.
Good teachers that actually educate are exceedingly rare.
The education requirements for teachers is a sick joke. If you get a master's degree in underwater basket weaving, have a tolerance for noise, you join a teacher's union, work 9 months out of the year, get weeks of holidays, get virtue by association, a retirement, and are basically employed for life. Unfireable.
The reason teachers aren't paid more is because what they do isn't worth paying them more.
Some of the smarter ones move to private schools, but more of the good ones burn out and either leave, or stop giving a shit. Formalized regurgitation and pavlovian schedule training prepares kids for 9 to 5 bullshit. Barely. The rest is hit and miss on a garbled curriculum of mostly irrelevant filler and fluff.
You can't continue inflicting the bullshit teachers on the good ones, or on the kids. Unions have to end for certain classes of employment, but especially teaching. A vast majority of teachers need to be canned and kicked to the curb.
Kids deserve better, and that starts with honestly addressing the problem in the classroom.
There's a market that works on software engineers. Ability, work ethic, and quality of output plays a significant part in who gets hired and fired. There are no mechanisms by which bad teachers are removed, as long as they check the boxes for attendance, not being visibly intoxicated, etc. The profession is riddled with incompetents and bad actors.
Actual good teachers are rare.
Simply being able to fire the bad ones would improve things immeasurably, but for some reason people put all teachers on pedestals. It's grotesque. Give PTAs hire/ fire powers or better yet, give the public a vote, weighted by testing scores or some performance metrics. Union ride or die is a garbage way to do things.
Treating teachers like a special caste of unimpeachable holy people is nonsense.
> Give PTAs hire/ fire powers or better yet, give the public a vote,
They are already good at driving good teachers out of the profession without a formal direct personnel role, giving them more power would make things worse.
Teachers can be fired for poor performance. It is just rare, because proving poor performance is dubious in education. Good teachers want bad teachers out. There just isn’t a motivating force for the supervisor to do it unless the teacher is truly a harm to the kids.
Everything going on in education over the past 20 years has been to add that overarching, cross school performance metric to measure teachers against each other. The problem is:
1. How do you measure performance? Tests. What will any educator or student tell you? Ends up test performance doesn’t really correlate much to the quality of the teacher. What it does correlate well to is income of the student’s parents. You teach in a school that serves low-income families? You’re fired. Also tests don’t factor that some students are special needs. You have a lot of special needs students in your class one year? Sorry. You’re fired.
2. No one could seem to find the money to incentivize good performance of teachers. Just fire poor performers based on dubious criteria. Not exactly motivating.
3. Outside of test scores, which are a bad representation of teacher quality and easily manipulated, there isn’t a driving force to fire teachers.
Your comments may be true some places but are broadly generalized. The states I’ve lived in have had great public school systems. They pay their teachers well and have great pensions and benefits. Where I grew up the administration did a terrible job managing funds but our teachers were great and eventually the state stepped in and got things running better. Problem is there are just some places that don’t give a shit about public education and places that have a big push to privatize it, and that sure as shit doesn’t always mean better. Just means our tax dollars are going to some company instead of straight to schools.
There are plenty people who are qualified for teaching children math. But it would be a disservice for them and their family to accept a low wage teaching job when they can work for $400k+ elsewhere.
Your argument is like hiring only minimum wage workers to build rockets, then complain that on average they don't provide that much value and can't solve integrals in their heads.
If we want better teachers, the solution is not surprising: pay more.
Just increase the numbers on the paychecks and the current bad teachers would all go away and be replaced by different, better teachers? Somehow, I doubt that.
I don't think you need someone amazing at maths to teach kids. In fact that would probably be detrimental for most kids.
I don't say that teachers don't provide much value because they're useless, but because they are usually very generalized and most kids don't seem be to that interested in learning.
Even if you fix problem #1, you haven't fixed the arguably bigger problem. I also don't think that significantly increasing the quality of teachers would change much for most kids.
Well, it is very common in situations like this to have 2 to 4 assistants, and I can't believe without them it would be possible to avoid hard conflicts and even violence on regular basis.
She has no assistants and never has (I just asked her). Occasionally a student teacher but not for years, now. Some students, such as ESL or special ed, are pulled out of class for about 30 minutes from 2–4 times a week but, the recent district policy is called "push in" where the specialist comes in to class to assist a particular student or two.
Where are you basing this on? In public schools in the US (at least in my hometown in Louisiana), schoolteachers don't get assistants of any sort. You get the occasional "student teacher," who is training to become a schoolteacher, but never more than one.
Faculty at colleges get teaching assistants, but their job is hardly to help with conflicts or prevent violence, their job is to help with instruction, grading, writing homework assignments, etc. When I was a teaching assistant, I myself tended to have 10-20 students in my section, and the class as a whole had close to a hundred people.
I'm most familiar with China (I taught middle-school classrooms of 55-60 in Yunnan around 2010, and had some friends in Guangzhou teaching 75-80), but I assume there have been & are plenty of countries with similar situations.
TFA implicitly conflates "leadership" and "management", suggesting that the author is oblivious to the distinction.
Even when the author describes dividing the responsibilities of "leadership" among multiple people, they describe dividing both leadership and management responsibilities between those people.
This is an authoritarian model that makes the local despot the bottleneck for the team: Decisions end up being routed through the "leader", individual growth and development and team value is constrained within the scope of the "leader".
These constrained teams have limited potential, and so, because of the leader's limited focus and the departure of team members who feel constrained, the organization develops cracks and holes in responsibility and ability to act on opportunities.
Managers who subscribe to this authoritarian model promote authoritarians, capable technical contributors who want more control over the part of the system they and their peers have been working in.
The best managers don't have a hard time finding talent for open positions on their teams: They already have networks of former employees and peers that they can use. Indeed, the employees of the best managers recruit for their teams as soon as positions open up.
But virtually all of the job postings you'll see publicly (especially for replacement positions or incremental growth) are described solely in terms of the project and the expected technical skill requirements rather than or in addition to the attributes that make a team more than a collection of extra appendages for a "leader". E.g. team values and non-values, the existing roles and expertise of the other team members and how the open position will complement those, the team's norms around work-life-balance and communication, etc, etc.
I think that the average manager at a tech company is not a good manager, and that the larger the company the lower the average (smaller companies just fail with bad managers). But by far most open positions at any time are positions reporting to bad managers.
One interesting note is that some people actually want an authoritarian leader because they don't want responsibility or more things to think about. I was talking online about how much I delegate to my team and I got responses along the lines of "the tech lead or manager should do all of that, why should I be doing their job."
>The best managers don't have a hard time finding talent for open positions on their teams: They already have networks of former employees and peers that they can use. Indeed, the employees of the best managers recruit for their teams as soon as positions open up.
It's also fairly easy to tell from talking to a team if the manager is actually good or not. If many people don't accept offers to your team then you may want to do some soul searching.
> some people actually want an authoritarian leader because they don't want responsibility or more things to think about.
It's easier to leave work at work that way.
1. Show up
2. Do work
3. Get paid
4. Leave
Your brain is freed to think of important things rather than work minutia. Of course, jobs like this often are mind-numbing if you're not the type to think with one half of the brain and do with the other and don't pay particularly great (in general).
> I was talking online about how much I delegate to my team and I got responses along the lines of "the tech lead or manager should do all of that, why should I be doing their job."
Well, that's because there's a difference between autonomy (e.g. "I'm going to let you approach the task in your own way without micromanaging your efforts.") and responsibility (e.g. "Your job is to do X and Y and Z"). What most people want from their leaders is some degree of autonomy, not necessarily extra responsibilities (unless there's a promotion attached...)
I wonder if there's an underlying cause for that attitude. I could see, for example, people working in a culture of high accountability and low trust trying to push decision making uphill lest they become a scapegoat. Meanwhile, places with a better office culture might feel more comfortable exercising autonomy and might value individuals taking the initiative more.
Agreed. Managers are empowered by organization and position. Leaders are empowered by inspiring and creating followers. They are diametric opposites in terms of mechanism and direction of power. Followers GIVE the leader power. Managers impose by force of position and control of organization power/money/etc.
The number of direct reports that function well as managed or led employees or any other organization hierarchy is about 5-7 but at most 10-12. This is a biological, neurological and psychological limit. It's also related to information theory and the UI-limits of the brain. It's related to chunking but also related to other limits of cognition and the finite number of hours in a day intersected with the minimal required cognitive focus/attention required to guide or manage an employee.
The distinction here is between Politician and Technician.
At the DevLead level one is a technician - diving into the complexities and trade offs and making a decision that will meet constraints that are the end point of a political process the devlead probably was not a part of
The politician you seem to be thinking of is someone (possibly the same someone) who is active in the political process that ends up deciding the constraints the technician works under - internal and external to the organisation
So this will be some of email threads or chats amoung some or all other devleads, it will be "being helpful" answering requests, assigning resources or time to help other politicians, or worse architecture diagrams, or it will be speaking at conferences etc etc etc. In the lingo it's becoming an "Authority". But one is only an "Authority" by being accepted by a "constituency" - maybe "all the devs in the company who think we ought to start using git" is your leadership position (ok maybe that's a decade old now but it's an easy example). Betray the constituency and lose the leadership position.
Neither are better than the other. Some political processes are better than others (in a democracy we perhaps appreciate this). Open decision making is likely to lead to long term better decisions - even if it is messy.
Linus Torvalds is an obvious leader example - using one political process (this is what I think - essentially using email as Thomas Paine used pamphlets)
But yeah - "managing" 5 people is reasonable - by the time you hit 12 it's a full time job listening to the moaning and they stop being a devlead. Only some can be a politican and a manager at same time.
> This is an authoritarian model that makes the local despot the bottleneck for the team: Decisions end up being routed through the "leader", individual growth and development and team value is constrained within the scope of the "leader".
This isn't an absolute conclusion, I don't think. I can speak for my own organization -
I lead 2 functionally-aligned teams, meaning they own internal product/systems for two different partner orgs. I also have a technical program management function which owns initiatives related to the above when they span more than a single team or are company-wide initiatives. I also have an engineering team with its own EM who roughly cover the scope of whatever my organization is doing - could be single-function, could be company-wide.
In my model, decisions from Principal/Director/Manager team members don't wait on me. They can if they want extra eyes or extra air cover, but otherwise, my job these days is less about setting technical direction and more about unblocking via executive alignment, budget, people, etc.
So far you might be thinking this is uninteresting and just means that my individual managers are the local despot, but I've done two things to (so far) eliminate that -
1. The TPM is responsible for getting us through the design stage, and they manage no one (or maybe other TPMs). This means they herd the cats and work with engineers and SMEs to get aligned on whatever design will make us functionally and technically successful.
2. This one is more on my qualities as a leader, but I also ask the managers on my team to err on the side of delegating more and letting their staff impress them, and being there as a resource when they need help. I think this is called servant leadership, but I don't read a lot of management stuff.
Team composition (experience and horsepower) plays a large role in whether this model can be successful and how hands on you'll have to be, but in trying to distill a decade+ of experience into a couple of paragraphs, this is generally how I like to run things. YMMV of course, I don't hold myself out as an authority, just offering a counterpoint.
> The best managers don't have a hard time finding talent for open positions on their teams: They already have networks of former employees and peers that they can use. Indeed, the employees of the best managers recruit for their teams as soon as positions open up.
If you adhere to the standard 1 year non-solicit, this isn't true right away. Hiring in my first year at a new company is one of the hardest parts of my job. But I'm probably a bit of a rule follower when it comes to the non-solicit - moreso than others, I've observed.
The f**ing article. A piece of internet slang that goes back many years, possibly originating on Slashdot and referring to the article that we're discussing here.
The article touches on it a bit, but I think it also highly depends on the person.
Some people are really good at leading large teams, others are better suited to smaller teams. It really also depends on the makeup of the team and how much you can trust them to execute without you intervening.
I've lead teams of ~20 without issue as a first time lead. It went very well, both for me, and based on feedback, for the team as well.
However what worked well there was that I could trust my team to both execute their work and stay on top of things.
What I found helped was making sure that everyone on the team was made aware of everything going on (in summary of course) so that there was less need to act as the central knowledge store, which is quite common for a lot of leads to turn into.
My experience is that this works fine as long as you 1) have a very well functioning HR team, and 2) nothing inter-personal goes wrong, 3) you have others taking on de facto leadership even if they're not formally in charge (you hint at this when you say you could trust your team to execute and stay on top of things).
But what I've repeatedly seen is that the moment you have conflict, if you don't have a manager per ~4-10 people, you're screwed unless there's a lot of organisational support pulverising the people management over extra people. Because suddenly a manager is spending half their time untangling some conflict and still need to have bandwidth to do all the other things they were doing.
As such I always look on teams with more direct reports than ~5-8 or so with deep suspicion. They may work well now, but they're often one crisis away from total meltdown. They're also often an indication of dysfunctional organisational leadership, who fails at promoting people to distribute responsibility.
"However what worked well there was that I could trust my team to both execute their work and stay on top of things."
This is key. Do you have people you have to take by the hand and guide through every step, or do you have competent, capable ones, able to think for themself (who will get annoyed, if treated like childs).
Reality is usually a mix and a valuable leadership skill is finding out early, who needs close supervision and who not. With very competent people, you can have a very flat hierachie.
I usually tried to lead at most 5-6 people building apps from the 80's until this year when I retired. What you said is basically what I did as well, leading is not dictating, but you do need people who can work with the minimally necessary information and still do what's needed. Keeping people in the dark, insisting on everything be decided by you, giving them no room to thrive, is a guarantee of disaster.
I found it interesting that the author was making a case for 2-3 people for someone inexperienced. I've seen people claim that you need to give someone new to leadership a team of 4-5 people because it is so easy to drop into micro-managing if you only have a couple reports.
I took on a lead role earlier this year and unless the 3 people on the team were all inexperienced or I had enough other things to work on, I don't think it would be enough. I do feel like my balance of attention is better with a couple more relatively autonomous people involved.
That's fascinating. 3 seems like a good average number.
I think there are minimums too. It depends on whether your reports are experienced or not. If they're experienced, any number is fine. However, if they're inexperienced (i.e. interns, or fresh out of college), you really need to manage 2 or more. 1 is weirdly a bad number.
Managing a single inexperienced direct report is truly challenging and suboptimal, both for the manager and the report. Having no peers to calibrate themselves to, the report feels insecure and is either too eager to please or becomes overly dependent. It's hard for the manager to know how to manage too -- you want to avoid micromanaging but everything you do is going to carry undue emotional weight on the report because they have no other reference points because they have no peers. If I had to do it again, I'd rather have at least 2 direct reports or none at all. 1 is just not good.
For firefighters in Germany this is, more or less, defined to be 5.
A group (which is one of the pre-defined tactial units) consists of 9 people: The leader, three troops of two, one machinist, one "Melder" (kind of the guy/girl for "special tasks", helping with whatever is necessary).
The leader commands the troop leaders, machinist and "Melder".
This is expected and taught as the amount of people you can actively manage and take care of in stressful situations like deployments.
edit: for larger deployments you'll have platoon leaders which will command a number of group leaders. for even larger deployments there'll be another layer of command so each platoon leader will only have to lead a set number of group leaders, too.
This is going to be true of more professional military specialists as well. A Special Forces team will have an officer leading 4 sergeants - med, comms, weapons, and construction(/destruction). This is more of an exception rather than the rule though.
I don't see how people are supposed to reasonably manage 10+ reports. At that point they are just a figurehead.
> I don't see how people are supposed to reasonably manage 10+ reports.
True! I'm leading 5 people at work and I find that enough most of the time, as I still have projects that I'm actively working on, too.
If there are more people to come, I'll ask to integrate some kind of "team lead" for some of them, before all the work I do is micromanage and respond to mails.
The article is generally reasonable, but it makes the common mistake of conflating leadership and management. This is specifically about directly managing a team. One can lead large groups of people (armies, departments) and huge projects spanning hundreds of people can be led by non-managers (I could also say individual contributors, but many folks also incorrectly assume this implies lack of leadership qualities/responsibilities).
If you work in a matrix organization you’ll work on many projects which have have many managers and as a manager you’ll manage multiple projects involving much more than 4 or 5 people. TFA seemed to be getting at this with multiple managers but didn’t take it all the way through. Matrix management is not a panacea but it does help productivity by making sure that there is almost always some progress happening and that nobody is sitting still.
I lead 4-5. I could lead more if I had the right tech leadership folks on the team. I agree with most everything from the article. Do you have people who can lead and mentor the other people on your team? Do you have people who can take technical leadership over projects? Is your team made up of all one discipline, like backend? Or made of of mobile and web and backend? How many junior devs are on the team?
I've been on a team where one manager was over 10+ people and I felt neglected and I felt like the people who didn't pull their weight got away with it and that work was pushed off on me.
All this is to say that I got turned down recently for a place I really want to work because I only manage 5 people. Hiring manager wasn't interested because of that single data point. The job was to take half a team from someone who was managing 12 people. Bullet dodged, maybe?
>All this is to say that I got turned down recently for a place I really want to work because I only manage 5 people. Hiring manager wasn't interested because of that single data point. The job was to take half a team from someone who was managing 12 people. Bullet dodged, maybe?
Sounds like they wanted to scale the team in the future and the current manager isn't able to do that. Rather than demoting them they're bringing on another manager to take half the team. Eventually the new manager would grow their team enough to be promoted and the current manager would report to them. Messy but may be the least messy approach that keeps the current manager from leaving.
Admiral Hyman Rickover -- one of the most successful engineering managers in history -- had about 40 direct reports: https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm
> "Some management experts advocate strict limits to the number of people reporting to a common superior—generally five to seven. But if one has capable people who require but a few moments of his time during the day, there is no reason to set such arbitrary constraints. Some forty key people report frequently and directly to me. This enables me to keep up with what is going on and makes it possible for them to get fast action. The latter aspect is particularly important. Capable people will not work for long where they cannot get prompt decisions and actions from their superior."
The number of people someone can lead is strictly based on their leadership score. For instance, as a 12th level wizard with a charisma modifier of +3 I can lead 23+1 people.
When it comes to ballroom dance it gets down to how many want to follow and where you want to lead them: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EqQ93LLOR_A . And the rest isn't turtles all the way down, rather it's leadership in dance exemplifying leadership in other stuff.
I would say more important than the experience of the team is their ability to work in a self directed fashion. I have had interns that work very well on their own, and I have had 20+ year veterans that need regular hand holding.
There is fundamental difference between leadership and management and it is pretty poor performance on author's part to write about leadership and management and not realize this.
She's a nationally board-certified kindergarten teacher in a public school.