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Less than two years ago, McKinsey declared middle managers “the heart” of the modern company. Harvard Business Review recently declared them “an organization’s moral compass”. But now the corporate layer cake is really beginning to wobble.
Following a tsunami of layoffs in 2023, last year saw the elimination of tens of thousands of supervisory roles across the white-collar workforce, with several companies striking entire tiers of management from their ranks. More cuts are predicted to come.
Changing of the guard
Though the trend extends across industries, large tech companies are leading the charge. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked things off in 2023, reportedly telling staff, “I don’t think you want a management structure that’s just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work,” before enacting a campaign of mass restructuring and layoffs that he termed Meta’s “Year of Efficiency.”
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Shortly thereafter, Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke issued a memo alerting his staff of a 20% reduction in staff, stating that the company’s “balance of crafter [Shopify’s word for individual contributor] to manager numbers” had become “unhealthy, just like it is in much of the tech industry.” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy followed suit last year, sharing plans to increase the company’s ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025. Not one to be left out, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced in December that he would reduce the company’s managerial roles by 10%.
Executives in favor of a more level organizational structure cite cost-cutting and faster decision-making as justification. In a widely discussed blog post published last September, Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham praised the trend for bringing companies toward what he called “founder mode,” a management style where CEOs take a hands-on approach at all levels, as opposed to hiring talented managers and giving them the autonomy to run their own department, or “manager mode”. Others have declared a “Great Flattening” of the white-collar workplace as we know it – and one that’s poised to change the trajectory of tech careers for good.
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The long, slow decline of middle managers
The corporate revolt against middle management has been decades in the making. A 2003 study found that between 1986 and 1998, the average number of positions between a company’s CEO and its division heads shrunk by more than 25%, while the number of division heads reporting directly to the CEO tripled. In other words, companies shed layers of middle management as CEOs took more direct oversight of company operations. By reducing hefty managerial salaries, companies also found they could easily reduce overall costs.
However, when companies attempted more drastic managerial cuts, the results were not always as desired. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin tested this strategy in 2002, eliminating engineering managers to see if a completely flat organization would facilitate new ideas and hasten output from developers. The experiment didn’t last long, with Page and Brin soon overwhelmed by staff members’ direct requests for guidance over workaday minutiae.
“As the company grew, the founders soon realized that managers contributed in many other, important ways – for instance, by communicating strategy, helping employees prioritize projects, facilitating collaboration, supporting career development, and ensuring that processes and systems aligned with company goals,” wrote the late Harvard Business School professor David Garvin in 2013.
Despite the cost-cutting incentives built into organization-flattening, companies like Google recognized that the benefits of middle management were worth paying for. But that all changed with the pandemic and subsequent dawn of a post-ZIRP era. In 2023 alone, managers accounted for nearly a third of total layoffs in the US, up from 20% in 2018.
A pileup waiting to happen?
“This trend aligns with a post-pandemic urgency to drive efficiency by optimizing costs, reducing friction, and increasing speed,” said Patrice Williams-Lindo, CEO at Career Nomad, a career consultancy in Chattanooga, Tennessee. “But speed without a roadmap leads to a multi-car pileup – employee burnout.”
Not everyone agrees that fewer managers automatically lead to burned-out teams.
“I think there is a false assumption, especially in many modern tech companies, that any engineer is solely good at the technical part of the job and lacks all other skills, such as planning and organization,” said Seth Geftic, vice president of product marketing at Huntress, a US cybersecurity company. “Often, tech teams are working on very specific tasks, which may be incredibly technical. Middle managers may not have the actual tech experience or working knowledge to understand these problems, creating a bottleneck of communication.”
Devansh Agarwal, a senior machine learning engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS) based in San Jose, California, echoes Geftic’s point. “If a strong AI product needs to be created, it would be mostly done by ICs, so there is no point in having a bunch of overpaid middle managers who won’t be doing much,” he said.
Paul DeMott, the Cincinnati, Ohio-based CTO of Helium SEO, observes a more mixed effect of today’s shifting tides. With fewer managers, “engineers maintain greater autonomy in their work activities while receiving diminished direct guidance from supervisors,” DeMott said. “This means engineers need to take charge of resource allocation as well as their professional development and team-wide communication responsibilities, which previously belonged to managers. Some excel in this environment, while others struggle with increased responsibilities.”
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The challenges and opportunities of a flatter tech hierarchy
For those who remain dedicated to advancing their careers in tech, the decline of middle managers poses both near-term challenges and long-term questions.
Agarwal worries that without sufficient managers to advocate on their behalf, ICs across organizations will be expected to increase output to an extent that will jeopardize their already precarious work-life balance. Yet, Agarwal has also been pleasantly surprised by the Great Flattening effects he has already witnessed among managers at AWS. Some have left management altogether and moved into IC positions, bringing their managerial communication and teamwork muscles to the table “Honestly these were some of the nicest ICs I’ve interacted with in my career,” Agarwal remarked. Others have been more proactive in taking on IC duties – player managers – such as tackling debugging production issues, alongside their managerial responsibilities.
DeMott echoes Agarwal’s observations with the belief that aspiring engineering leaders should adopt a more hands-on approach than what was modeled by many of their managerial predecessors. Going forward, “technical leadership positions will gain more importance while engineers will directly guide projects and provide guidance to team members without assuming managerial responsibilities,” he said.
Geftic shares the belief that tech’s Great Flattening will result in technical leadership roles becoming more central to organizational operations. He predicts that the shift from a people leadership strategy to one that foregrounds technical leadership will replace the current top-down management model with a more lateral approach, “where tech teams actively relay information to one another.”
Within this reconfigured management framework, Geftic predicts there will be new kinds of leadership roles for engineers to pursue that marry strategic planning and technical know-how with the soft skills typically associated with people-management positions. It could even create a path to leadership that better aligns with what engineers enjoy most: solving problems and building. “For specialized tech workers, I think these changes could be an extremely positive shift.
