Honest question, I come from an industrial background where you have Work Package Manager in charge of the work of roughly 10 persons but not their actual manager with all the bureaucracy associated and an actual manager with less than 25 reports don’t exist.

Is 4 reports common in the US? How do companies survive with so much management?

I'm not in the US, but 4-5 reports is about the right size for a tech lead that wants to stay hand-on. With 8-10 reports you might struggle to sneak some personal contributions in, and if you have more direct reports than that, then you're a full-time manager by necessity.

Ok, so it's more or less what I'm used to. WPMs are indeed not expected to contribute and a tech lead for a team of 5 is what I would expect.

I was more surprised by the idea that you could both be a tech lead and deal with all the issues surrounding budgeting, hiring, company goals alignment and career development issues I associate with being a manager. It seems to me like that means having a lot of people to train and have to keep in the loop.

Well I’ve never seen anyone below director (or vp in larger orgs) meaningfully decide anything related to budgeting beyond some stupid team offsite thing. Hiring you can scratch off too right now lol. Company goals again this is vp level, everyone below is just a messenger. And finally most management dont stay long enough to meaningfully participate in career dev unless you mean handing out promos at review time (sounds like that should only take a few weeks a year)

It's a fair question. At least speaking from my experience, the figure varied depending on the type of work and the employment classification.

I should also add that 3-4 is number of full time employees, not contractors.

For example, it wasn't unusual to see engineering managers with 20 direct reports as long as most were contractors. They usually had couple of full time employees who were senior or leads.

> How do companies survive with so much management?

Zero percent interest rates