Should Engineering Managers have developers across different teams reporting to them, or is it best to manage within one team? What are your experiences with this?
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Simple answer is it should all be in one team. However it's more complex than that. In the huge teams we had, we did a "Center of Excellence" structure where the people were organized by skills. e.g. DBA Team, Server Team, Desktop Team, ABAP programmers, JAVA Programmers. Problem was in Project Management. Your project would call for 30 hours a week from a DBA, and 40 from ABAP team and 20 from JAVA. On paper everyone approved the project plan and resource loading. In reality, you needed a specific DBA that was the over allocated, so you got some new hire who you would need 90 hours a week to do the work of the other DBA..... was a total disaster. They dismantled that ORG structure with the next CIO after about 4-5 years. And 4 years was about our average CIO and organizational lifecycle. Shortest was about 1.5 years, didn't even completely finish that RE-ORg. If you really want to hold individuals, managers, directors, VP's accountable for their deliverables? Then they need to control the resources(people and budget), and control their pay raises and performance reviews.
It depends on the context and overall structure followed. Some times when there is a pool of talent , they are line managed by an EM and allocated to other teams based on work demand . When the EM is owning the multiple
Projects it is a different scenario. I guess I need more data on the way engineering and teams are structured.
I've always found it works best when the Engineering Manager has direct visibility and connection with the work at hand. When they are connected to the work, they are more effective at helping the team achieve their objectives. The team will notice that they "understand", appreciate that dedication, and will follow their lead. When they are spread thin across multiple teams with different backlogs, and potentially different domains, Engineering Managers will lose that context. Developers will notice that too.