"report" 'someone reporting to a manager'

[Dave Wilton]

>From my personal experience in Silicon Valley, this sense of "report" is so
frequent that I never even considered that someone might find it unusual.
It's not all that recent, being around for at least a decade or so, possibly
much older. I can't recall if it was in use back when I worked for the
government.

Searching for "direct report" might help in separating out the chaff.


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Arnold Zwicky
Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2009 11:02 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: "report" 'someone reporting to a manager'

from a friend yesterday, writing about interviewing job candidates:

   I just imagine that hiring looks very, very different when hiring
someone to be a report and not a peer.

this use of the noun "report" was new to me, but i could pretty much
figure out from the context that my friend was writing about
interviewing someone who would report to him as manager.  he has now
confirmed this:

   I'm X's manager, he is my (direct) report and reports to me.

so this is a business use, possibly recent, but with a frequency that
is hard to determine (other senses of "report" get in the way, and
when i restrict the context to reduce these, i get no relevant hits).
it's certainly known in the computer world; other informants (among
them, my daughter) recognize it.

an older term for 'a person who is managed' is the obvious
correspondent to "manager", namely "managee" (i know, i know, a lot of
people just hate -ee words that they take to be innovations).  the OED
(draft rev., Sept. 2000) has an entry for "managee", marked _rare_,
with cites from 1847 (!) and 1979.  to judge from googling, it's of at
least moderate frequency nowadays (though hits for the Managee content
management system make it hard to sift through things).

arnold

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