I wonder how many direct reports these managers have. Does anyone have insight? I believe 1on1 is good from my experience in companies where there is a lot of change and a lot going on the #1 feedback I get is people want more information, more 1on1, more team time. With roughly 40 direct reports 1on1 is nearly impossible with the other demands.
At one time I had multiple teams with 16 direct reports - at that point it was very hard to have a weekly cadence for 1:1's with everyone, as that would've been 8 hours a week. My solution to this was to start with bi-weekly 1:1's, having 8 people scheduled one week, the other 8 the following week. Then each week I had office hours scheduled - this was time dedicated to the team to be able to book my time and was not allowed to be booked for any other meetings - this way people who wanted to meet on an off week could. The second step was determine who could (and wanted) to step up in to management roles - ultimately, this lead to promoting two managers under me, and moving their direct reports to being a monthly skip level 1:1, reducing my overall bi-weekly 1:1's across my part of the org.
Honestly, I think 40 direct reports is borderline insane. You can't effectively support that many people (as you note yourself). Speaking as the author of two of these READMEs, at Netflix I had at peak around 12 direct reports (one was a manager with his own reports) and at Slack I have 3 (all of whom manage their own teams).
How anyone can watch Fox and trust anything they report is mind boggling. Not suggesting other news outlets are not bad but stuff like this make Fox look more like a satire. Maybe its time for the emergence of a new news organization that does actually do investigative reporting.
This is important because this Texas court is not just any court but THE court where most patent law is deliberated. The fact that this was struck down here is a victory. Most of these trolls are shell corps setup by a group of lawyers with no technical council strictly to manipulate the legal system to extort money from tech companies willing to settle than battle it out in court. I hope this starts to slow the onslaught of frivolous lawsuits by wanna be lawyers. We spent Millions last year out of our R&D budget to defend ourselves from this nonsense. They target companies with potential and growth and use models to determine optimal circumstances for settlement. Maybe this will slow the destruction of innovation and American jobs driven by these greedy people. Lawyers wonder why they have a bad rap but yet they don't seem to police their own. Sadness:(
I posted the article because I think Google can do better and thought it would stir up some discussion. Google has had this issue for a long long time. The process appears to be highly automated and potentially impacting innocent people buying into the platform and investing time building up a base. I also may be a bit hypersensitive given the many articles I keep encountering regarding the United States govt and detention of citizens based on their Facebook and Twitter comments along with my own dislike for the ways the multinational corporations operate these days. I wouldn't say it is fear mongering as you will find no shortage of sites and blogs with stories of disgruntled customers. Just hope Google addresses the issues and remembers part of what makes them a great company.
