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Comment by pargon | Hacker News Reader

> 8 layers of management is a lot of management

Seems like a fair assessment. Maybe they should start by getting rid of the people who put that structure in place?

Didn't they do that? Staples only came in as CEO at the end of 2024, and I assume he has been working on a plan to restructure the company since then. Because their financials are not great, and they have been losing money every year since 2019.

I don't know about gitlab, but tech companies (Meta and Grab) tend to hack off the bottom of the management chain, instead of cutting off the top (aka as the people that created the 8 layer system).

bottom level teams are merged to form larger teams.

Yeah, they never fire the VPs and SVPs in this process. Just a bunch of the hard-working line managers who are actually involved in the day-to-day engineering work

Companies are shaped more or less like pyramids. If you want to cut a meaningful amount of people from the organization, there's just not enough of them at the top.

But salaries - sorry, operational costs - are an inverted pyramid.

If one person at the top of the pyramid earns 100 times what people at the bottom earn, cutting a few of them is still meaningful. Also, cutting a single/few person(s) that are mismanaging the whole organization is extraordinarily valuable too.

How does that justify keeping the people who created the mess in the first place and mass firing people who didn't?

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