It's easier to manage four people than one

I was once the sole report of a &quot;senior developer&quot;, and the article nails every pain point that caused me to leave. His code had tons and tons of serious problems. The database was a mess; he insisted on storing multiple data points in a single column, querying the entire table, then regexing out the information he wanted in php foreach loops. This was because the database was so bad you couldn&#x27;t join more than two tables without crashing it. He vetoed everything I tried to do to improve the codebase, really normal best practices. I read books and books and tried coming to him with sources on why we ought to normalize our data, or use prepared statements instead of the unreliable homemade sanitizer function he brewed up. He had been insisting for years that long load times were unavoidable. I was so frustrated with the situation that I didn&#x27;t bother to help him save face when I fixed everything with a couple of indexes.<p>I spoke my grievances to the owner who listened with open ears, but he told me directly that it was hard for him to know what to do because it was outside his field of specialty and the senior dev had more experience and a long tenure at the company. I appreciated his honesty, and started job hunting immediately. I only worked under that senior dev for 7 months.

One reason is that it’s a part time job to manage one and a full time job to manage 4.<p>Generally people put a part time job on the back burner and focus on the main full time job.<p>Just speaking from experience.

If you manage one person you get all the overhead of managing people but only the productivity of one person. Same for offshoring. My company has people in India so we often get one or two persons added to the team. This produces enormous overhead due difficulty of communication over a 12h time difference but we still get omit the work of two people. It would be way more efficient to have ten people there so the overhead is worth it.

My manager has ~14 reports. We&#x27;re all on different projects every quarter and my manager knows nearly nothing about any individual project.<p>I see arguments for essentially the same problems from the article:<p>- Managers aren&#x27;t reliant on the feedback or success of individual reports. &gt;80% of people will always give positive feedback. - Managers don&#x27;t give feedback or help resolve problems. It&#x27;s effort on their part with no upside. - We&#x27;re all still isolated because there is no consistent team. - No one has context. Managers can&#x27;t understand 10+ projects.

I think the key question here is...why manage one person. A one to one ratio of managers to &quot;workers&quot; seems completely rediculous to me. If you insist on one to one then assign a mentor, not a manager, at least if it&#x27;s a technical domain and there&#x27;s an option to assign someone that is not a pure manager.<p>If you&#x27;re ever assigned to manage a single person, it&#x27;s better to go big picture and wonder if this is a reasonable way to run a company (imo). If a single person is working on a project that requires oversight that person should be senior enough to &quot;manage themselves&quot;. If they are too junior, the team should be bigger (because it&#x27;s important enough to require oversight). If it&#x27;s oversight due to legal issues that&#x27;s fine but then the management can be hands of and should basically spot check that everything is following said legal requirements.<p>At least that&#x27;s my humble opinion. I treat one on one manager to technical role relations as an organizational smell.

&gt;Note: mangers should be very invested in their report’s success.<p>I have never had this experience in my entire professional career.<p>How does one arrive at such a privileged and pampered existence? Like... they treat you with dignity and respect? What sort of war crimes do I need to commit to get this kind of job?

Overlooked: managing 4 people confers more authority and subordinates are more likely to be cooperative.

Co-author of OP here, cool to see this post come up again.<p>An even more challenging situation that I&#x27;ve seen since is the 1-1-1 management system (manager manages 1 person, who in turn manages another). When that arises, you really need to fix it as soon as possible, either by rearranging, or hiring people to spread the number of reports.

Agreed with article; the 4th point around context is almost universally true - to put it another way, you cannot make a bell curve with a single data point. It becomes difficult to accurately evaluate how well a single person is doing. Yes, there are some absolutes, but underneath most seeming absolutes (&quot;this is how long it should take to accomplish activity X&quot;, &quot;this is the minimum acceptable quality for product Y&quot;), lies experience and statistics. ~four people is a good starting size as you can more accurately plot how well people are doing, <i>and</i> how well you are doing as a manager.

This should also mention as a generality that managers should get training and support from the organization.<p>This, in my experience, almost never happens. Companies just assume you know how to be a good manager. They shouldn&#x27;t make that assumption even for experienced hires, especially if they&#x27;re looking to establish a specific culture.

I was once put in the position of co-managing a single report. Two managers, one of them a first time manager, and a senior report - it was one of the hardest management experiences I&#x27;ve had. I was far easier to manage two parallel teams of 5 than to manage half of one person.

If your whole job is to manage one person, your real job title is probably &#x27;personal assistant&#x27;. Of course, this inverts the power structure in hierarchical organizations, and it probably points to some kind of problematic internal organizational issue with the outfit.

What does &quot;managing&quot; mean ?<p>I am not trying to be argumentative. But there are a lot of arguments in this thread basically going straight past each other<p>My two cents are<p>- user proxy (product manager)<p>- standards enforcer (linter)<p>- resource gatherer (arguing for resources from other managers)<p>- political actor &#x2F; representative<p>- mentor &#x2F; coach<p>Now, most of not all of these are <i>also</i> things everyone says one should do for one&#x27;s own career.<p>I am just wondering, what do most managers bring to the table other than neat hierarchy drawings? Is it basically a nice coach like role?<p>How much power should a coach have?

I&#x27;ve managed a team with only 2 reports. Wouldn&#x27;t recommend it unless you&#x27;re the founder&#x2F;owner. In my experience the minimum size for managing a team should be 3 direct reports and not more than 9.

I can take care of ten houseplants easily. I immediately overwater and kill a lone houseplant.

Is it really not uncommon for a manager (even a new one) to manage a singleton? That has always felt like an antipattern to me. On my team I would not mint a new manager unless they had at least 2-3 reports.

I don’t get all the negative comments about 2 person teams. It happens in small companies and startups. You bring a domain expert and you also hire a junior or less senior person. And sometimes you don’t even need to hire more, the team can be super productive or the projects are as many as required for a team of 2.<p>Personal anecdote: I have done it twice as a manager and had great experience and collaboration both of the times (at least this is my take in both of them). The key is to not see yourself as a manager but more like a mentor and equal contributor to the projects. It also requires great communication skills and openness, as well as taking as many opportunities for new projects and cross team collaborations as possible, in order to not alienate the team as well as make the direct report feel that he can grow with you. Of course it happened that no bad experiences or bad hires happened in both my cases, but tbh i suspect the consequences would be small as small team usually means small projects. I have seen worse cases from bad hires, or bad collaborators in larger teams and way larger projects, which can also deteriorate the morale in more people and teams.

I was given a single report once. Then a couple months later I was told to fire him. Apparently that&#x27;s the reason I was given the report. Mgmt sucks.

Managing one person becomes hard because neither manager nor subordinate have a comparison point. Particularly because in these scenarios the subordinate is new to the working world and the manager is new to managing. They are both the best and worst employee&#x2F; mangager either have ever had and they have no context to know which is true.<p>The truth becomes more clear in later in both individuals professional journey. I can look back early in my career and realize I had a terrible 1:1 manager, but thought it was me. I can also look back on a time I managed an employee 1:1 and recognize where I could have been better.

A post which assumes that organizations must be run hierarchically. Why does a team of 2 people need to have one command the other?

As somebody soon to be leading a small team, these were wonderful points beyond just the single report pitfall

Additional idea: there is a different relationship between worker and manager, and between (manager) and (manager of managers). If upper level manager has a worker as a report, I doubt he will be able to handle this in the same fashion as mid level manager.

Why wouldn&#x27;t you simply have the singleton report roll-up to the next level? Something has to be incredibly wrong with the organization for this kind of stuff to happen, surely?

Does it make sense to ever have less than 3 reports?

The ease or otherwise of management depends entirely upon the local notion of what &quot;management&quot; is. This varies widely, but usually consists largely of somebody&#x27;s hobbyhorses, unrelated to pragmatic considerations.