It's almost always the CTO directly managing ~15 engineers. The CTO is always a man. He's always hiring a manager only because he doesn't have time for the 1:1s anymore. He never believes in hierarchies. The engineering team is flat, he tells me. They don't need teams, no siree. He's only interviewing me, he assures, because 1:1s aren't a good use of his time anymore.
Don't worry, he assures me, he'll still take care of all the architectural decisions. And he might even manage half of the team still, he hasn't decided.
That's usually about the time I nope right out of the interview.
In my experience, the desire to "delegate" 1:1s typically signals that team is raising truthful (and deeply troubling) problems, which the executive does not want to think about. Rather than think, they rationalize: claiming that consistently and privately listening to their subordinates is "not a good use of my time", "drama-filled", "not relevant to the tech", "isn't that what HR is for?" or some easy excuse. Whatever helps them coast until they jump ship next year.
Good on you for avoiding that mess, and for not playing along with their softheaded pretense.
The traditional path to leadership roles generally involve a stepped process from a role that's fully an individual contributor to one that has virtually no IC component. It's progressive enough that by the time you've stepped up to another level of management you've already grown accustomed to what you needed to let go of and what you needed to shift focus to, while having someone above you to essentially provide integration and regression testing as you acclimate to your new role.
A CTO-by-default skips that and goes from IC to "executive level authority and autonomy". They're not only managing people all of a sudden, but architecting teams and org structures. With little or no prior experience to lean on.
So they nope out of it - avoid org structure planning (and ensuing uncomfortable decisions) by keeping it all flat, bring in a people manager as a short term solution to the problem they created with keeping up with everyone, while also avoiding some of the messier side of people management. And seek comfort in the familiar work of system architecture and (maybe) keep directly managing the parts of the team that are the most capable of self-management and aren't as uncomfortable to manage.
Still a mess to be avoided, just as you said. But a mess that's rooted more in inexperience and discomfort than in arrogance and hubris.
Of course, differing degrees of stratification are still possible. The "Spotify model" decouples team leadership and cuts down a bit on stratification by distributing authority. But even then the model is not at all flat when you zoom out. And the smaller degree of stratification comes at the cost of incurring extra overhead resolving decisions amongst multiple stakeholders who have all been empowered over certain limited aspects of different teams/projects/services.
That said, it is extremely important to distinguish between a technical lead and a people manager. They require different skillsets and mentalities. It is more likely that a competent developer will make a good tech lead than a happy manager. "Promoting" a developer who doesn't actively want it is too often a mistake that the developer solves by finding a more suitable job. Don't lose sight of the fact that when you promote your best developer to manager, the only things that are guaranteed are that you've lost a good developer and gained an inexperienced manager.
This is why many tech companies have established parallel promotion tracks for tech and people management. With neither being inherently superior to the other. In fact Google's top employee, Jeff Dean, manages nobody. See https://ai.google/research/people/jeff for more on him.
Not true. He has VPs as his direct reports and thousands of indirects.
Maybe it was true at one time, even in recent years. But not now.
I am pretty sure it was true in 2010. I wonder when it changed, and why.
They may be less competent than you are at managing four people. But they may be more competent at directly managing four people than you are at directly managing 15 people...
In my experience, though, I see managers and therefore companies struggling exactly because they do the opposite. They are unable to delegate, to trust and to think "he or she doesn't have the right experience to do it". Sometimes this stems from pride and arrogance - you are unable to admit that someone else can do what you are doing and you should maybe focus on something else. It can go as bad as a power play: if I grow people, eventually they want more and more.
Other times it comes simply from ignorance: I have always done it this way, and I am not sure how to move forward, because nobody in the team is ready to lead.
This is obviously untrue, they can definitely do it, and there are people I’d be happy to see in those roles, but the quality of work would suffer in the short term, and we have a ton of deadlines/projects to complete.
In many places there is always something urgent and there will never be a good time to slow down. Then you end up in my first point eventually. So part of your job is to create that breathing room, push back on projects, get people trained, etc. Think long term and not just moment to moment.
edit: And if you think training people now is painful, doing so when you're actually past the breaking point will be be a lot harder and cause a lot more disruption.
I spent a lot of time training people in my previous job only for them to come back to me with basic questions about what I taught them over a year later.
What was missing was technical leadership from above: the managers didn't realize (or value) the need for the team to get familiar with the systems that they were working on, so they didn't make sure that the team learned these things well, or brought in a few more people who could guide them in addition to just me.
It’s on both of you to get at least one other person trained.
Which is better? Long term failure or short term hiccups?
The only thing I would push back on is the 1:1s - evidence shows it's most effective to meet weekly[1]. Delegate the 1:1s to your team leads (effectively making them the real EMs) and then have your problem-solving meetings become your 1:1s. Now you're managing managers, which is what makes you a director in the traditional sense.
[1] https://www.manager-tools.com/2019/01/manager-tools-data-one...
It seems like you aren't a manager, but rather a junior director who doesn't know it yet.
13 people across 4 initiatives is too much to directly manage effectively. Find someone to lead each one, and make them team leads.
Meet twice weekly with your leads, once to plan, once to problem-solve.
Move your HR/career-oriented 1:1s to every-other-week. If any of your team leads are good with people, delegate your 1:1s.
You only need a half hour for recurring meetings.
Delegate more.