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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

The one good thing about excess management is when the economy takes a nose dive and the company is looking at doing layoffs, the excess managers are the first ones to go. I see them as shielding us developers from being laid off.

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I'm my experience it's the exact opposite and they lay off ICs and leave the managers largely in place, making it worse.

I’ve seen this first hand. You wind up with “managers” that have 1 or 2 reports. What are they going all day? Going to meetings, it seems.

try seeing it from the other perspective: i am tasked with doing X, but i have to spend all day every day discussing X, and Y and Z with the higher ups and other teams, so that i have to get an assistant to actually do X.

Over the past 24 years, I've been through six major layoffs and it is always the middle managers that go first. Recently my company went through a massive layoff. I don't know a single developer that was let go, but plenty of middle and upper managers were.

>the excess managers are the first ones to go

Well, second to go, right after they have the task of laying off their team first.

Username checks out because that rarely happens. Ics get the boot first.

That hasn't been my experience. Over the past 24 years, I've been through six major layoffs and it is always the middle managers that go first. Recently my company went through a massive layoff. I don't know a single developer that was let go, but plenty of middle and upper managers were.

Is this meant as some version of the broken window fallacy?

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