I know the general view is middle management sucks and I can see asking first level managers to become ICs may make sense in some cases, but that also means someone else is managing x times the number of employees. How is that supposed to scale?
I mean, if there are lots of managers at Meta who only have 4-5 direct reports, you could see this scaling decently well -- turn two teams into one, and that's not so bad.
But I don't think one person can constructively manage more than about 20 engineers at the absolute maximum.
