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My company for the last 20 years has kept trying to get rid of managers. About every 5 years, they layoff a huge portion of middle management under the guise of reorganizing to be more efficient. All that results is that the more senior leadership gets burned out, the lower levels of staff feel ignored and have no career path, and huge swaths of talent and potential talent walk out the door for better opportunities. They eventually bring back the middle managers only to repeat the cycle again. Middle management serves a purpose when it’s used wisely and efficiently.
To me this is largely a way to prevent salary growth and cut out people who have climbed the corporate ladder to a decent pay package. IC will never pay as much as a manager except when the IC has skills that are truly rare and difficult to obtain (which is almost never the case).
Given how common it is for people managers to utterly fail at managing and for senior leaders to not even understand their own business, I’m willing to wait and see how it plays out (at Amazon) before calling it a bad move.
It’s very likely, however, that there will be adverse affects within certain parts of Amazon and to other industries. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution and companies have the bad habit of following trends and leaning into cost-cutting efforts before actually solving their unique problems. If a company thinks their manager population is bloated, they should be working on 1) making the good managers more effective (through culture and standardized processes) and 2) improving and acting on manager evaluations.
I don’t doubt that less management might very well equal more efficiency in some places. Strong and decent leadership absolutely keeps everything going fairly smoothly, but that isn’t the case at a lot of places. Management is just a middle man and does put a lot of red tape where it doesn’t always have to be.
Aren't there studies showing the optimal number of employees per manager is 5-10? I'm a manager now, and have had 9-13. The people manager portion is 10-20% of the job. I feel like I don't have the time to be the manager I want to be to my employees. I can't imagine a 20+ group of direct reports.
Before I was a manager, I had managers with 20+ employees. I spoke with them twice a year for 15-30 minutes. They didn't know me and I felt abandoned and without a clear path in my career. Eventually I left those roles.
I had 30+ people to manage for almost 20 years. It took up the majority of my time. I was layed off last year along with many others in “middle management . Recently spoke to a former team member and they said they now have no support from their new leadership, no growth opportunities, no training, no constructive, personal feedback, no team meetings and only contact with new leadership is once a year during their review, which the team disregards any “feedback” because it’s so generic since the person has no idea what they do or how they do it. Many have been there 10 years or more and are ready to leave. Good managers keep good employees.
I think tech is rampant with middle managers who don’t execute much and don’t have a desire to manage other people. They were usually high performing ICs whose path up was to become a people manager and utterly fail at doing so.
I had the same experience with UPS. Massive layoffs of mid and senior level managers.
I'm a manager elsewhere in the tech industry, and the same thing is happening here.
It is also happening outside of tech already. I assume (and hope) this is a short term fad that will go away when businesses realize that this doesn't materially change their business situation and might be counterproductive.
Relevant article from business insider. Link is not paywalled.
https://archive.ph/9FKPs