lol I read "as many as 15+ direct reports" and thought it was hilariously low. My manager at google had like 50+ directs in 2010. And he was the best boss I've ever had.
Popular conception of what a manager is is wildly unambitious.
Weekly 1:1 is performative and useless. It's not what makes a good manager. What makes a good manager is:
* Having excellent domain knowledge and judgement
* Having the respect of the team, to settle disputes
* Solving problems when needed
* Hiring and retaining an excellent team
* Picking the right things to work on
If a manager is doing these things well I don't need a standing meeting at all. Or we can meet quarterly to check in.
Email is a thing.
Interesting. I'd define all of those tasks as the job of a team/tech lead, rather than a manager. I've worked at places where the same person did both roles, and it was not always a great mix.
This is stupid and irrational. It's like seeing someone eat 100 cakes, and then assuming everyone can do it. And then getting diabetes afterwards.
It seems quite counterproductive to assume such a system would scale to everyone else, or that everyone else could possibly implement this. This is cowboy levels of human resource management, not careful engineering.
I mean I have 7 reports right now and we're a startup. And fully remote. And I'm still contributing as an IC too.
A manager who is also contributing code is almost an entirely different role than a manager who is not contributing code. Typically the former should not exist in a smaller org and in a larger org it makes sense to shift to the latter because there's enough non-code work to do that you might as well dedicate whole people to the task.
Different roles though.