Honest question: What do managers do in your company?

- Do they still code?
- How many direct reports do they have?
- Are they in charge of the sprint/backlog grooming?
- How frequently do they interact with their direct reports?
- And what's the subject of these interactions?
- what do they do outside of that time?

In my company, managers have 2-5 direct reports, do not code, and mostly talk about career development for 1 hour every other week with their reports. I'm not sure what they do outside of these few hours every week, despite asking multiple times.

My company has no managers, bc startup. We have a business+marketing side and an engineering side with equal authority over their domains.

At Amazon, it varied on the level of managers. TPMs and SDMs didn't code often, and usually only did so as part of their personal tasks or when it filled a need in the team. SDMs did involve themselves in CRs though.

@SortOfTested

interesting, I'm also in a start-up but we grew past the size where managers could be done without, apparently. How many people are you in the tech team?

@wonderwhy
3 teams of 3, plus myself. We won't need much more for that sans a major shift in the model.

I have two direct managers. One does most of sprint planning. The other is basically in charge of insuring any infrastructure that needs added or changed (we have a bunch of different teams that handle different parts so with any project we usually have at least one major part that comes from outside our team).

Both managers participate in our daily stand ups. Both communicate with just about everyone on almost a daily basis. One manages 8 of us and the other (the infrastructure guy) manages like 30.

Neither code everyday. But usually when our backlog starts filling up they will work on any bugs they can without having to bug us. And every once in a while they will work on small features if they aren't tied to the rest of the project.

Yes

Our managers plan the sprint, work with customer success teams, participate in and encourage design discussions, troubleshoot production issues, conduct performance reviews, fight with other teams for themselves and for ourselves

Mostly drink coffee and gather in meeting rooms to find somekind of artificial reason for their miserable useless corporate lives. In afternoons writing emails on random popular topics like "how Ai gonna change the process x" while having a degree in social gender studies, copy pasting random sentences having no logical context whatsoever.