Bonfire of the Middle Managers (economist.com) 61
American companies have begun cutting middle management positions at rates not seen in years. Google eliminated 35% of managers overseeing teams of fewer than three in August. Fiverr announced in September it would shed managers to focus on AI. Amazon trimmed its management ranks throughout the year and cut positions at its cloud-computing division in July. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg has complained about managers managing managers since 2023.
Phrases relating to reducing management layers appeared 98 times on earnings calls of companies in the S&P global index this year, twice the frequency of all of 2022. The cuts stem partly from an uncertain economic environment and President Donald Trump's tariff regime, Economist writes. The pandemic created the conditions for the current retrenchment. Companies furloughed staff during Covid-19 and then hired rapidly to meet demand for e-commerce and digital services. They promoted employees to management positions to retain talent even when those managers supervised only one or two subordinates. Between 2019 and 2024, five of the ten fastest-growing job categories were management roles. Since November 2022, listed American companies have cut middle-management positions by around 3% on average.
Phrases relating to reducing management layers appeared 98 times on earnings calls of companies in the S&P global index this year, twice the frequency of all of 2022. The cuts stem partly from an uncertain economic environment and President Donald Trump's tariff regime, Economist writes. The pandemic created the conditions for the current retrenchment. Companies furloughed staff during Covid-19 and then hired rapidly to meet demand for e-commerce and digital services. They promoted employees to management positions to retain talent even when those managers supervised only one or two subordinates. Between 2019 and 2024, five of the ten fastest-growing job categories were management roles. Since November 2022, listed American companies have cut middle-management positions by around 3% on average.
I have 8 bosses (Score:5, Funny)
I have 8 bosses so when I messup I have 8 people talking to me.
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Please go re-watch Office Space.
Re:I have 8 bosses (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I have 8 bosses (Score:5, Insightful)
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The frustrating thing to me is that they don't coordinate, or talk to eachother, so I am constantly explaining what i'm doing and why to different people...
This exactly! I eventually got most of them to not bother me on a weekly basis by sending them a status report of the previous day's work the next morning. It still sucked having to do that. It also pissed one of them off. Something about him needing unique input that the other managers wouldn't understand. I guess I didn't understand either because he never asked anything "unique" that I was aware of.
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What if you're working on 5 projects? Then wouldn't each of those project managers be your direct report? I typically had 3 to 6 projects' schedules overlapping at any give
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Re:I have 8 bosses (Score:4, Funny)
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I have 8 bosses so when I messup I have 8 people talking to me.
This is referred to as the "Matrix" org structure, because you start to feel like you're living in the Matrix. On the upside they are all human, because no digital lifeform would be this bad at communicating.
Re:I have 8 bosses (Score:4, Insightful)
So the team you manage, is your bosses!
Re: I have 8 bosses (Score:2)
Shove this Jay-Oh-Bee
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A slave with two masters is a free man.
Yikes! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yikes! (Score:4, Informative)
lion food: [IBM] n. Middle management or HQ staff (by extension, administrative drones in general). [catb.org]
From an old joke about two lions who, escaping from the zoo, split up to increase their chances but agreed to meet after two months.
When they do meet, one is skinny and the other overweight. The thin one says "How did you manage? I ate a human just once and they turned out a small army to chase me --- guns, nets, it was terrible. Since then I've been reduced to eating mice, insects, even grass."
The fat one replies "Well, *I* hid near an IBM office and ate a manager a day. And nobody even noticed!"
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Mention middle management and right away IBM comes up. Some things never change.
Rookie numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Rookie numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, managers of 2-3 people are not required, that's just a crazy ratio, but "middle managers" often have 10 or sometimes 30 reports. Just having weekly 1:1s with your team can eat a large chunk of your time. It's not productive work, but it's the necessary lubricant in the corporate machine.
Re:Rookie numbers (Score:4, Insightful)
Managers should have 5-6 reports, but they should also do actual productive work, not only management. Maybe they only put in 8 hours of actual work a week, but a) this keeps them engaged with what is actually happening and b) if they cannot do real work, they are not qualified to manage people anyway. If it takes a long time to have check-ins with your employees then you've got big problems.
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Re:Rookie numbers (Score:5, Interesting)
I was a programming lead, and this is pretty close to how I worked. We scheduled my time as 50% management and 50% programming. If I started getting over 50% management, it was usually an indication of something else significant happening. Sometimes that was fine and sometimes it wasn't, and we'd do something about it.
But doing that "individual contributor" work was the only way I could ACTUALLY manage. If I'm not reading and working on the code, I have no way to assess the programmers I'm supervising, and no way to know if as a team we're actually achieving our goals.
Management for the sake of management is honestly a bit insane to me. I understand that not everywhere has a structure like a game company (fortunately), but I firmly believe if all you do is manage, you'll always be easy to manipulate and lie to, and you'll never actually know what's going on. It makes you a worse manager.
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"teams of fewer than three"
Did no one read this?
Add those 2 onto your team of '5-6 reports', add in another team of 5-7, and you've got the ratio I spent most of my corporate career operating in. When I was in a team of 3, my 'manager' was really the senior team member. Consolidation sent me to a team of 4 others, he moved to manage a team of 8, and a week later he got another team of 5.
At that spot, this sort of consolidation was the norm in 2012. What's taken the rest of them so long?
lol flamebait (Score:2)
This is one of those examples of people coming back later and modding my posts down to try to make me STFU.
Check my karma bitches, it ain't workin'
Re:Rookie numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
As Forbes said, middle managers are the overlooked leaders who hold the organization together [forbes.com].
Re:Rookie numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
The role of middle managers is to execute the plans of upper management.
not disputing that, but i've come to think that the role of middle managers is often to inflate the headcount, because headcount tends to be a criteria both for the perceived valuation of the company (specially if the intent is to sell), and also the preceived importance of higher level management: you're worth as much as the number of people reporting to you. now, if you want to increase headcount but don't have actual work for that many people, middle management role is a good choice as its output is very hard to measure and it gives the impression that your staff is very busy and organized and your company is valuable.
this has been going on for a while, specially so in the startup sector but actually anywhere where venture capital was the main fuel. and it worked if the aim was to artificially grow and then sell out. however, i've seen projects go bust because of middle manager chaos, and i have also see companies go bust in consequence.
however, the game has changed quite a bit now. ai is now the hot investment lure, and one of the salient points of ai is that it allows to reduce headcount, so greater headcount has ceased to be attractive, quite the contrary. so to increase your perceived value it's better to ride the ai wave and invest in fancy ai tools and get rid of the deadweight.
now, as we have discussed previously here, the case of 35% reduction in google in particular was a completely different thing, those weren't really layoffs but just internal reorganization. but, well, middle journalists may ignore these very signifiicant subtleties if they don't suit their bombastic headlines ...
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35% is a good start
The 35% figure at Google is misleading. The vast majority of those people weren't pure managers they were software engineers who managed small teams as part of their duties while also doing productive technical work. A policy requiring a minimum of 5 direct reports for each manager was put in place, forcing all of those people to decide to either increase their management and cease doing significant technical work or cease being managers and focus entirely on technical work. Many chose the latter option,
I Have to Object to This Framing (Score:3)
Very few of the Middle Managers, not nearly enough, are actually being burned.
Re:Pay top individual contributors properly (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a good thing (Score:4, Insightful)
It's hard to understand the proliferation of layers of management
Maybe it's empire building
Maybe it's a leftover from military organization
Maybe it's some sort of personality quirk
Whatever the cause, most middle managers impede progress and reduce value
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I think it's one of Celine's laws. No manager should manage more than 5 people. This may well imply that they should have skills other than managing.
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Having worked in organizations with "flat" structures, I can assure you that no organization is truly flat. There's always a pecking order- even among people with the same title.
The difference when you have a hierarchy is that at least it's formally defined so you know who has to take responsibility. That doesn't mean formal hierarchy is always good- it can be used to push others down unfairly or exclude, but it can also be better than people having to navigate murky political waters to decide who has the
Public sector issue: salaries (Score:5, Interesting)
I can only speak for the public sector, but the talented people that stay in the public sector eventually have to move up to management positions for only one reason: A bigger salary.
The real problem isn't about too many managers. It's about politics and culture: "I'm THE manager, so people beneath me cannot make more money than me!"
If leaders eliminated that single stupid, corrosive paradigm from their org's culture and people were paid what they're worth based on merit (not title or hierarchies), these pointless middle management jobs would disappear overnight. "You mean I don't have to manage anyone and I get paid what I'm really worth? Wow! F**k those management responsibilities! I'll take door number 2, thank you."
If you're a manager and don't like this because you worked your way up in the current culture and would feel slighted by this change, you need to STFU. You're not BETTER than your subordinates because of your title. You're just managing others because that's your job that you're officially trained to do - manage people. And those people may be just as important, if not more so, to your organization as you are.
Re:Public sector issue: salaries (Score:5, Insightful)
Any organization that knows what it's doing will have parallel promotion tracks for management and non-management.
In the specific case of my company, I "Sr. Solutions Architect" have a job grade roughly equivalent to a director, and above that of anyone called "manager", "supervisor", or the Sr. versions thereof. The "principal architect" I work with is equivalent to the sr. director that manages the whole team. I think the individual track tops out around VP/SVP level here. And yes, a non-sr. director can be managing an SVP-level non-management employee.
America did away with middle management ages ago (Score:2, Troll)
Basically they were doing double duty the entire time.
What I see a lot of is companies that promote people into management roles for small raises with large increases in pay and then as those people get older they fire them all with the excuse that they are cutting management
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Hardly surprising (Score:1)
Hmm, Zuckerberg (Score:3, Interesting)
"Meta's Mark Zuckerberg has complained about managers managing managers since 2023."
So, what does Mark do? Maybe manage managers that manage other managers?
Of course, I simplify his myriad responsibilities. For example, being a visionary in pushing forward things like the Metaverse and AI glasses. Also, having lunch with Trump. And lifting restrictions on Trump's social media accounts, ending third-party fact-checking, and scrapping DEI at Meta.
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"Meta's Mark Zuckerberg has complained about managers managing managers since 2023."
So, what does Mark do? Maybe manage managers that manage other managers?
Mark Zuckerberg voiced by the guy who played Milton: I make the [expletive] [expletive] decisions so the engineers don't have to. I have decision skills! I am good at making decisions!
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No, not Milton, Tom Smykowski (jump to conclusions guy)
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No, not Milton, Tom Smykowski (jump to conclusions guy)
Gah! You're right. My bad. I'll turn in my geek card. :-D
managers overseeing teams of fewer than three (Score:2)
What are they even managing at that point? I would struggle to assign a team lead to a team that small. Presumably these were senior IC that needed a pay bump to keep them from going to another company? Maybe they assign a manager to every single internal product?
Fewer than two? (Score:3)
Google eliminated 35% of managers overseeing teams of fewer than three in August
Fewer than three would be...two.
So Google eliminated 35% of managers who were overseeing only two people? Why not all of them?
As a manager directly overseeing 11 developers, it's hard for me to imagine why a manager would ever be required to oversee just two.
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The employees from that 35% went to the other 65% that had two employees and turned it into three. Problem... Solved? :D
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The employees from that 35% went to the other 65% that had two employees and turned it into three. Problem... Solved? :D
That is essentially what happened. They didn't fire 35%, those 35% just transferred their reports to others and became ICs (Individual Contributors).
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Amazing...
Seagull managers (Score:1)
Good! They are seagull managers... they swoop in and make a lot of noise, shit on everything, then fly away.
"managers overseeing teams of fewer than three" (Score:2)
"I may manage only two employees, but let me tell you, I manage the f*ck outta them!"
Managers vs Doer/Manager (Score:3)
I think there's a difference between a middle manager who does nothing but manage people (all substantive output performed by others) and people who do individually contribute but take on certain management responsibilities.
Yes, it makes no sense to have a manager who only manages 2-3 people if all they are doing is managing. But more often I see this when you have one person who is doing highly skilled/high value work who needs assistance to enable them to focus on that work. Think of the surgeon with a nurse and a surgical assistant or a lawyer with paralegals who report to them. The surgeon isn't a middle manager, but they do have people reporting to them. It often makes sense for the assistant to report to the principal because they are the ones who know the work best. Personally, I've managed small teams as part of my responsibilities, but it was only in addition to may "day job" where I was preparing deliverables totally independent of what the teams were doing.
Middle management is a problem when they are not actually doing anything other than telling others to do work and evaluating that work, especially when they may lack the expertise to properly evaluate it. Those of are the positions ripe for elimination.
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Huh. Your example misses something. The surgeon and dedicated assistants are the team. Well else seeing them is to serve and facilitate.
PMI and agile are two cancers being removed. (Score:3)
I love the bleating sound these micromangers are making now that they are being fired from their "cat herding" BS jobs. If they had the slightest clue, they would have long ago realized you don't manage programmers, you lead them. This means you don't "herd cats" you get a treat, and lead them to where they want to go anyway.
One good leader can "manage" the same number of people as a dozen or more PMI trained micromanagers.
A friend of mine who fired 100% of his managers and replaced them with a few leaders, said, "I could tell who was a manager, and who was a leader, simply because the managers were always complaining about stress and overwork; whereas the leaders were comfortable with how things were going, even when bad outside things impacted their projects. They had no problem with having their teams deal with any problems."
Only 35% of managers? (Score:1)
If you're only managing 2 people and you're not going to be hiring more then yes, you should be cut.
Also note that google has had record layoffs in the previous months, so basically they fired a bunch of engineers, and only afterwards they fired the managers who now had tiny teams due to the layoff. Priorities.
Shades of the Hitckhikers' Guide to the Galaxy (Score:2)
Remember the B Ark? Anybody for a bath?
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fprogramm... [bbc.co.uk]
Good riddance. (Score:2)