Ask HN: Is middle management the most vulnerable/disposable in a corporation? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is middle management the most vulnerable/disposable in a corporation?

56 pointsyalogin63 comments

Is there such a thing as what I described in the title or is it just my imagination/biased thinking?

I am only talking about tech orgs in a company and not other sectors like marketing, HR or sales. Feels like hiring individual contributors is still going on but there is a lot of managers/directors looking for jobs. Are there any stats that give a percentage breakdown of the layoffs?

If so, which level in the management is safer relatively speaking, if there is such a thing?

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No, there's no reason that middle management is, in general, the most vulnerable to layoffs.

If a company decides to shutter a product or division, everyone might get laid off, from ground workers to middle management and even directors. If a company performs overall layoffs, it's going to lay off primarily from wherever they've overhired. One company might have overhired developers, another company might have overhired middle management, while a third company might have overhired sales.

Companies are generally trying to be pretty rational in only hiring positions that are required for the company to run/grow. Obviously they get this wrong all the time, but I'm not aware of any evidence they get this wrong more often about middle management.

I know there's a whole trope about middle management being useless, how you could cut it entirely and the company would still run just fine, but nothing could be further from the truth. A VP can't have 120 direct reports. There's no way for them to get the information they need to make good decisions, nor is there any way for their direct reports to get the information they need to make good decisions. It just doesn't scale.

I don’t think it relies on middle management being useless.

Eg, “spans and layers” optimization specifically targets middle management, while there’s not really a similar lever for ICs alone (maybe automation? But you prob get rid of managers there too)

They might increase the number of reports per manager and then layoff managers more. This could be seen as getting the same amount of work done more efficiently.

If they get 120 times the compensation they should also be able to read 120 times more, don't you think?

Basically. It’s part of the deal when you become a manager, imo.

ICs are vulnerable because they’re low-level, but they’re also more fungible, so they can be more easily transferred/find new jobs.

Management is more of a socio-political game (it’s all about the people). A huge chunk of your value is reputation, trust, and relationships - which are very much non-fungible.

So managers are vulnerable (like ICs), but non-fungible (like execs).

As they say: slow to hire, quick to fire.

Adding on - there’s no level it becomes more safe. Senior folks get increasingly vulnerable - as comp increases, so do expected results.

In a high comp place, there’s no safety, only alternative options.

A golden parachute is another form of safety, arguably

Maybe, though many of those high rollers have a lifestyle that would die as soon as the golden parachute runs out. (I don't know if many is a tiny percent, or most though)

The higher you go the fewer people who can sack you

> The higher you go the fewer people who can sack you

This. As an IC, it only takes 1 of the 8 managers above you to write your marching orders. But as a VP, only the CEO or the SVP can write those orders.

At most bigcorps your manager can’t unilaterally fire you. There’s a whole HR-driven process. And if your work is measurable they are probably doomed, which is much easier to achieve as an IC. (Obviously this excludes things like violating laws or policies)

Plus the chance that managers 3+ levels up know or care about it you is minuscule. As a VP you have much more visibility. If your org does poorly you can get fired quite easily

Managers 3+ levels up won't fire you individually, just cut entire teams/departments.

> At most bigcorps your manager can’t unilaterally fire you. There’s a whole HR-driven process.

But any of the 8 managers above you can initiate that process.

> And if your work is measurable they are probably doomed, which is much easier to achieve as an IC. (Obviously this excludes things like violating laws or policies)

The effort to fire me may be doomed, but only for now. The intent to strike a person is already there. More managers == more chances of developing intent to strike someone.

Not really. It's not that a whole lot of people are needed to sack someone. While a couple of people might be involved the ultimate decision will most often be made by a single person - and that is true regardless where you are in the hierarchy.

The lower you are the more such single people above you who can sack you.

In a well functioning org that is not the case. That's my point.

But it's exactly the case. As I pointed out in another comment, more senior managers may not know or care about you individually to sack you, but instead you get caught as departments are cut to reflect strategic changes.

It's simple probability. The more people above you, the greater the odds of being sacked.

This seems less true for ICs. Layoffs hit the juniors much more than seniors and Ma y principal+ ICs I know barely do anything. Although it could just be a transient phenomenon based in relative supply/demand.

I see companies hiring lots of middle management during high-growth phases, as the "plan" is to have them grow their teams. And then the market changes, and headcount targets change, and all of a sudden there's a glut of managers as the headcount target is now completely different.

So, yeah, vulnerable, but mostly because we suck as an industry at understanding and managing people as well as we manage money. If we were good at it, there wouldn't be such over-hiring and layoffs that cause me to see articles like this: https://hbr.org/2022/12/what-companies-still-get-wrong-about...

I completely agree with this post. Additionally, any manager that is actively interviewing with a company should interrogate not only their financials but the product viability. Your job depends not just on your ability to deliver but much more so on the success of your program / product. This may be entirely out of your control.

'How would you handle shutting down this program/product?' Should be a standard question for interviewing managers.

A company that fires the "ground workers" quickly gets no work being done.

A company that fires all the "executives" is extremely rare.

But you can fire all the middle management layers and the company will continue to operate for a period of time, perhaps quite a long time.

> A company that fires the "ground workers" quickly gets no work being done.

Got any examples of this ever happening?

There's a saying: closer to the ceiling is closer to the door. The higher up you get, the more likely that you're blamable for problems, and the less likely that you are repurposeable for some other project.

Tell that to the current tech layoffs - while there's some middle management heads rolling there's very little "top level" layoffs.

In the current environment upper management protects their own jobs as the utmost of importance and then worst case ensures they leave with millions of dollars and favorable reviews even if they were a complete charlatan.

Yep from what I have seen of the recent tech layoffs few, if any, have included the leadership responsible for the poor hiring decisions that created the headcount they now say is a problem.

I know several VPs “affected” by layoffs this year. Often they get a chance to leave on their own terms instead of being part of the general pool so you might not realize it

> Tell that to the current tech layoffs - while there's some middle management heads rolling there's very little "top level" layoffs.

From an organizational efficiency standpoint: If a large company lays off 15% of its work force, it'll still need its top level people. It hasn't suddenly removed the need for a COO, etc. So what you're proposing doesn't really make sense.

> the more likely that you're blamable for problems

taking responsibility and owning a team / department / vertical is explicitly the point of managers.

There is no blanket answer. The real determinant is whether your particular business unit/silo/group is a profit center, how well your department is directly enabling the company's business model, etc.

The only tried and true way to achieve job security is to understand fundamentally how your firm makes its money and to make sure you're an important part of that value driver chain.

Even then you need to see when your firm is pivoting to something new and make sure you are in that new area before the pivot. This is hard, most companies try many new things, and only rarely decide to give up on a profitable venture just because it isn't the future.

Here's an analysis someone made for the Google/Meta layoffs: https://www.warntracker.com/blog/meta-layoffs-was-it-really-...

This is essentially an advert for their tool of course.

I know some managers at Meta that were forced to convert to IC. So it makes sense that fewer were laid off despite them wanting to reduce management layers.

Of course this could be a good argument for being a manager (assuming you are fine with switching to IC)

Let me ask this - do you think Captains are no longer needed in the military? What do they do that Majors, Colonels, and Generals can't?

They execute.

You see, your directors, managing directors, VPs, presidents and C-suite people - they're all the high brass, i.e. the Majors, Colonels, and Generals. They're responsible for setting the vision and creating the strategic plan. They're not positioned for tactics and execution.

The people positioned for tactics and execution are the people who work with production, i.e. the doers. In the military, it's the Lieutenants and Captains that are on the actual battlefield. They're middle management. They're the people that fully understand the vision and strategy and yet are empowered to control the means for getting it done. They're in the trenches with the troops, enduring their pain and hardships, and building camaraderie. They're LEADING. THAT is what a middle manager does, or at least should be doing. If your middle manager isn't doing that then they should be replaced. If your company's high brass doesn't understand what a middle manager should be doing then you need to leave - it's unlikely you'll succeed pushing that rock up the hill and you can apply your energies elsewhere with an organization that has a clue for how to run things.

The "safety" of your job depends on the value you add, and on making that value legible to the company.

Sometimes, you have frontline managers who make a team amazing - I'm talking multiples of productivity. They're rare. You shouldn't fire them. If they lack the skill to make that impact visible, they'll still be on the list.

Sometimes, you have director+ folk who do great work at strategically aligning a group. Same thing: If they can make it visible that's what they do, and how it impacts the bottom line, they're in a better position than if they can't.

But in general, management value is harder to make immediately visible than IC value, and managers are producing less immediate and more long-term value. If you're about to run out of cash, they are an easy cut. You can always hire them back if you survive. Cutting ICs means cutting immediate value delivered, so they are less prone (if they deliver value. Fire your low performers)

If you're an IC thinking about management right now? Think carefully. Make sure you have a large IC component remaining in your portfolio. I'd still say "go for it" if you truly enjoy the challenges that come with managing, the differences aren't that stark. But if you're looking to optimize for career growth and retention, this is a higher risk path.

That's incorrect. Plenty of high-performing people were laid off from key projects in the last 2 years.

Most tech layoffs had directors needing to meet a quota, so no matter how good people were or how core their work were to the company, they had to pick people to be laid-off.

Once software is built, it takes much less effort to maintain it.

Middle management is vunerable because it's operational(not tactical or strategic), you can increase a lot the wingspan of a manager of managers without having big consequences and tech companies have done it and cut out the managers that didn't have the minimum wingspan.

Job prospects for managers of managers at the moment isn't good, but I'm guessing any of them can still jump back one step and go back to a manager of ICs and still do a good job.

I'd recommend that anybody that works in tech, no matter what rank they are (even director), still keep their tech chops up to date to a certain degree, you never know if you'll still be perceived by your peers as somebody that can bring value.

And it's simpler to prove you can deliver value by being a senior engineer than a VP.

Overall, for those that were laid off from big tech, I hope they end up actually founding new businesses or moving back to startups, building real stuff.

Re-read the part on making the value legible to the company. That's the same as you saying "prove you can deliver value".

If you can't do that, or if you truly don't add value, then yes, your number will come up. And while there might be a quota, the way folks will look at that is "who'd least impact my team if I laid them off".

Which also means that you should avoid being purely operational. If that's all you do... Maybe you should treat your operational work as a paid job search phase, because that will only last as long as there's plenty of money.

The dirty truth is that a lot of middle manager don't bring that much value and create artificial work.

There is that narrative that started a decade ago that we need empathetic people managers that are doing a completely different jobs than ICs, and that their role is extremely valuable. The narrative seems to push the idea that ICs and engineers are extremely bad at inter-personal communication and therefore that higher class of better communicators is required.

I have never bought this and see a lot of middle manager doing busy work constantly syncing with other middle managers. The best companies I have worked for had big horizontal teams with technical managers. The worst companies have been hierarchical with multiple managers/directors all passing the buck to each other.

Yes.

Middle management is basically managers managing managers. A few levels of those could be eliminated, causing more stress for the survivors, but the workers aren't actually affected so it's a direct cost savings on the back of the surviving managers.

Depends on the size of the org. Large orgs have a large middle for a reason. When executives need to make choices they talk to the middle and they tend to suggest cuts to anything except their job. It astounds me that actual productive people lose their jobs when their is usually a wealth of pencil pushing, PowerPoint wielding, decide by community do nothing's in the middle. And this is coming from a once wrench turning product manager who is now firmly in the middle. There is a balance to be had, but larger orgs are insanely top heavy.

I wouldn't say that, those are the managers responsible for executing a business strategy. If they don't show desired results you're probably right, but if they do then they'll probably be trusted to decide who to get rid of under them and still show desired results. Can they fire a whole team and replace them with an offshore team? Replace a vendor/product they use or get rid if a product/feature and still show results? If so, all a company cares about is money so they're pretty safe.

"Is there such a thing as what I described in the title or is it just my imagination/biased thinking?"

They are uniquely vulnerable, typically higher comp without direct tie back to the margin and topline of the business, particularly true since you've excluded sales from this analysis.

"If so, which level in the management is safer relatively speaking, if there is such a thing?"

Do you know a C-level or c-level direct who can & will personally intervene on your behalf? If not, you're vulnerable.

Some companies try to have few levels of management. Span of control, the number of people reporting to each manager, has been increasing slowly for decades. Here's a 1976 paper, from before business had much computer power.[1]

Here's a Delotte report on how to find managers to lay off.[2]

There should be studies of how computerization of management affects span of control. What do JIRA and Slack do to it? Haven't found one yet.

(Now and then I mention the future being "Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0". Amusingly, neither Google nor Bing has the reference. It's from "How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe", by Yu, where the protagonist has that program as a boss.)

[1] https://faculty.lsu.edu/bedeian/files/a-history-of-the-span-...

[2] https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/human-capital/articles...

Totally anecdotal but at the FAANG I worked at I saw some awful and incompetent middle-management survive, even post-layoff

Maybe it is. However, there's no direct way from a worker to a C-level. So there needs to be some kind of a selection process. Could be at least partly the reason for the existence of middle management.

So, for an individual company, it might be possible to dispose middle management. But certainly not for an entire industry.

You think middle management's job is to select for the C suite? I fear you live in a dream world.

indeed it is. your suitability for C-level depends on your ability to maneuver your way out of middle mgmt, often as quickly as possible.

That assumes internal promotion and selection by middle managers. For internal promotion selection by senior managers is more likely. More so for external hires.

Well, your question is not right, but it is very close to right.

Right question for business owner, who are the most important in business to run (VITAL important), and who are the least important.

Usually, investors consider, CEO as 80% of company cost, because good CEO have command of managers and hr's who are tightly coupled to him and could just hire all other need people from job market.

So, this could have slight differences in different industries, but mostly this mean, safest is CEO.

CEO usually have command of people for most important things (if he could not do himself, or don't want to do - accountant, hr, finance director, marketing manager, team-lead, in some industries could be lead architect and in some security).

All others could be changed to people from nearest college.

BUT! You should use this info with HUGE grain of salt, because, if some CEO consider somebody part of his core command, this mean, this human is really best fit for this CEO.

For example, I in my life seen tens of hr's, and may be 2-3 of them are really superstars, one even have very meaningful surname, translated to English as Ant :) And I have seen very few people, who spent so much energy to work.

And yes, this also mean, there are many companies, where just don't need superstars, they want moderate persons to do moderate work.

That depends. Disposable is all about where the company sees value coming from and not. Often companies will start a project fund it for a few years as the hot new thing and then change their mind and cut the project: sometimes those people are let go, sometimes transferred to something new. Sometimes a company will cut profitable business to focus better on something else.

A company needs some middle management, but it is really easy to get more middle management than a company needs. If this is your company, then as soon as upper management realizes this they will reorganize and cut middle management. The same applies to all other levels of employment: if the company thinks there are too many people in a position some will be let go.

Probably the most vulnerable are new grads. They're not expected to produce value, and are really an investment. However, when making short term decisions, you cut investments that aren't known to pay off long term.

They are no more or less vulnerable than anyone else. When a company does cuts they usually do so in a vertical slice. ICs, managers, even executives are all affected on a proportional basis, because the company will want to continue to maintain its management ratio. Being left with 30 ICs in an org with 1 manager or 5 managers with 10 reports are both non-ideal scenarios for the company after a layoff.

Anecdotally I can say that experienced engineering managers with a good track record are significantly more in demand in the industry than ICs.

In my experience principal+ ICs are more in demand than managers. But below that its true. This just reflects supply/demand though it’s not like a law of God

Perhaps. I am not sure. If you are good, you are very valuable as a manager. Perhaps there is some kind of factor that the risk is multiplied with, and it can be positive or negative

The bureaucracy is a well-oiled machine on its own. It has a self-perpetuating nature, following its own set of survival rules, just like the principles of evolution by Darwin.

There's a classic book called "The Bureaucratic Phenomenon" that delves into this very phenomenon. Interestingly, middle management doesn't exactly boost the value of the products or outputs, but it keeps growing to cater to its internal demands and desires.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01CF0YIKA was recommended to me back when I was a manager for a time. I recall it was a great read on this general topic. I... sadly, don't remember much of the details anymore. :(

In a similar vein, this was published recently https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-on-books...

> there is a lot of managers/directors looking for jobs

I would imagine there are a lot less managers/directors jobs available to the open market, since many of these roles are hired internally. So it makes sense there are more managers looking for jobs, regardless of the job's perceived vulnerability.

If you want to get rid of middle management, you need to have a flat structure as part of your company ethos. You can't just fire middle management and hope things keep working. Flat structures work, but they are not simply a hierarchical model with the middle ripped out.

I’m a founder of a company, and I hire managers. It depends on the person skill set, and not the title.

The business still needs middle management, but they are cutting the weakest people. It just turns out that a lot of middle managers are weak.

I'de say an M3 with no "moat" and wasn't an OG is the most vulnerable.

"Middle management" gets a bad rap I think, I moved from big company middle management positions to startup founding teams and back my entire career. More senior managers in big companies typically lacked operational chops.

Every corporate worker should read and reread “The Gervais Principle” until enlightenment.

tl;dr middle management stays with the company until collapse (give or take a few unfortunate incidents), long outliving their (and company’s) usefulness.

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