Who is going to fill the engineering leadership vacuum?

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

When Google cofounder Sergey Brin recently said that managers’ duties are the “easiest thing” to automate with AI, he made it clear that tech’s recent push to cut middle management isn’t slowing down. 

But new studies suggest this shift may be causing problems. Across industries, a leadership vacuum is starting to emerge, with fewer young workers volunteering to pick up the reins. A lack of middle managers is at least partly to blame. 

Software teams are no exception to the trend. And as several industry insiders tell LeadDev, staff engineers are especially feeling the strain.

The pipeline problem

Much of the trouble comes down to succession gaps. As more baby boomers look to retire, there simply aren’t enough workers to take up senior leadership roles. 

According to a Development Dimensions International (DDI) survey of 2,000 HR professionals and nearly 11,000 corporate leaders, 75% of companies aim to promote leaders from within. However, fewer than 20% of HR heads say their companies have employees who are prepared to step into critical leadership positions. The middle managers that might have once filled this void are now in short supply. A Korn Ferry survey of more than 15,000 professionals worldwide, 41% said their companies had eliminated middle managers over the past year. 

Further complicating matters, Gen Z workers are reportedly wary of pursuing a traditional leadership track. In a poll by the UK staffing firm Robert Walters, more than half of Gen Z workers said they don’t want to become middle managers, with 69% saying that middle management was “too high stress, low reward.”

Though generational attitudes may explain some of their reticence, it stands to reason that Gen Z’s caution is directly informed by the tumult of today’s leadership climate. “Many people, especially Gen Z, are starting to resist becoming a manager because in many cases you’re doing two jobs for the price of one,” says Lia Garvin, a Bay Area leadership consultant who has worked for Google, Microsoft, and Apple. 

Not only are Gen Z workers less enthusiastic about becoming managers, but DDI’s survey found that they’re nearly three times more likely to quit because of lackluster management. In other words, short-term leadership gaps are threatening to undermine long-term leadership pipelines. 

All the while, workers across the corporate hierarchy have found themselves under new pressure to lead teams and develop junior staff without additional compensation, training, or support. 

The plight of staff engineers

Pankaj Khurana, the Bay Area-based VP of technology and consulting for the recruitment platform, Rocket, says there’s no question that the leadership vacuum has arrived in tech. 

“At Rocket, we support dozens of high-growth startups, and many are operating with noticeably leaner management layers than just two years ago,” Khurana says. 

Many companies that eliminated middle management positions through layoffs have chosen not to replace those leaders, instead distributing their duties to remaining employees at lower levels. More often than not, Khurana says, this work has fallen to trusted, senior individual contributors like staff engineers. 

“Some rise to the challenge, but many end up burned out or quietly disengaged,” Khurana continues. “We’ve seen strong engineers leave not because of tech stack issues, but because they felt like accidental managers without support.

Nic Adams, the co-founder and CEO of the AI cybersecurity platform 0rcus, shares a similar observation. When tech orgs strip away management layers, “staff engineers become managers in everything but name,” says Adams. “Many quit after a few quarters because they are doing two jobs for one paycheck, especially in companies where staff positions are treated as simply deep experts instead of organizational glue.” Adams anticipates that many such companies will soon battle burnout, stalled projects, and staff turnover – if they haven’t already. Some may even resort to poaching expensive managers from outside.

Innovation also stands to suffer. “If your most experienced ICs are too busy managing chaos, they’re not building,” Khurana says. “That’s a missed opportunity.”

Ryan Walker, VP of technology for Thomson Reuters CoCounsel, believes that the current leadership trends may even point to bigger shifts in the evolution of engineering career paths. “Longer term, we’ll see new kinds of senior engineers who function as hybrid IC/leads, embedded AI-augmented technical strategists, and staff engineers who have more cross-functional responsibility than ever,” Walker predicts.

Bridging gaps and paving new paths

To bridge leadership gaps in the near term, experts agree it’s vital that organizations provide leadership development and support to those in de-facto management roles. 

Adams suggests that companies give rising senior employees clearly defined leadership responsibilities and the freedom to learn without putting their careers on the line. From there, Adams recommends that organizations rebuild their middle-management layer, invest in engineering managers and tech leads who can grow and support teams, and recognize collaboration and mentorship – “not just code throughput.”

For some companies, this may involve some creative short-term restructuring. Khurana says that he’s noticed some companies are finding new ways to delegate responsibility within dev teams, assigning select staff to specific coaching or peer-support roles. 

These interim positions are distinct from formal management roles, largely designed to help engineers “handle soft-skill demands without pulling them away from technical work.” Some companies are also revamping internal mobility frameworks to give staff engineers clear career trajectories that prioritize either technical excellence or leadership readiness – “and they’re being explicit about what each path looks like.”

Organizational flexibility may prove especially useful in a future where ‘leadership’ is not necessarily synonymous with ‘people management’ in tech. “The best future leaders may not want a team, but they may want influence, ownership, and impact,” Walker says. “Managers should give their top ICs opportunities to own cross-team initiatives, mentor newer engineers, and help shape org-level architecture decisions.” 

In the long run, companies that build replicable leadership-learning and support processes are also better positioned to develop future leaders from within their ranks. But those systems may be moot without the right incentives.

“We need to make it worth it for someone to take on the additional professional and emotional work of being a manager,” says Garvin, the leadership consultant. “This looks like a clearer path to promotion, training and development, coaching, community, and financial incentives.” It isn’t enough to develop leadership capacity; companies need to get better at rewarding it.