Tag: middle manager layoffs

Is there a more mocked role in the tech industry than the tech middle manager? 

I don’t know about you, but the first image that pops into my head is an amalgamation of Office Space supporting characters – a middle-aged man in a short-sleeved white dress shirt and high-hanging tie, a little puffy from all the salty breakroom snacks, and the personality of that old-school cork board with workplace regulations that no one has ever read.

The tech middle manager role might be breathing its corporate last, as megacaps like Amazon and Meta lay off middle management to restructure their organizations into flat hierarchies, and AI becomes the de facto standard for pushing papers, pixels, and priorities.

And that begs the question: When tech middle managers are extinct, are we going to miss them?

You know what? I think so. 

For as much as the tech industry has always looked down on the tech middle manager role as an escape hatch for dulling skills or a back door into tech for the technically disinclined, this role may have been the glue that held the tech industry together.

I’m serious. Here’s why we’re going to miss the tech middle manager.

We Need More Meetings About Meetings

I hate meetings. There’s a little bit (a lotta bit) of agoraphobia in me that makes it a legitimate complaint, but I’ve always seen internal meetings as a waste of time. In fact, at one of my companies, we rolled out a program called, “No-Meeting Mondays” where no one was allowed to schedule an internal meeting on a Monday. That day was for getting the week kicked off right.

And the thing about meetings is they’re like an evil version of Pringles. Once you put one meeting on the books, you’ll wind up with 20. Entire days will get sucked into a vortex of repeated 15 minutes of small talk followed by 40 minutes out of the remaining 45 minutes that don’t pertain to you in any context whatsoever. 

Tom Smykowski’s “Jump” To Conclusion: Meetings are a necessary evil. A team without coordination isn’t a team, in fact, it winds up being less than the sum of the parts. 

Look, the unflinching truth is that the cartoonish, bloated image we have of the tech middle manager is the exception, not the norm.

Yes, the middle manager is the “no fun police” of the tech team, but what I’ve learned over 30 years in tech – in almost every role except middle management (I got lucky) – is that almost any meeting with more than three people, without the coordination that comes from a single authority, becomes a power struggle of arguments and ego trips. The tech middle manager is actually the preventer of chaos. 

As an aside, “No-Meeting Mondays” was a disaster. What happened was Tuesday through Friday got overloaded with meetings, because of the artificial scarcity, and God forbid you were sick on a Monday or, you know, Memorial Day and Labor Day happened. Your week was toast. People eventually just started scheduling “secret” meetings on Monday. 

And meetings to talk about preventing meeting overload are meetings to talk about meetings. We had a good laugh at the end.

Those Tickets Aren’t Going To Assign Themselves

Well, yes they are. 

The only thing your average tech worker hates more than Jira is waiting for their manager to triage, scrutinize, edit, measure, question, discuss, prioritize, and assign the work to… honestly, whomever just got freed up.

The primary threat of AI to the tech middle manager is that AI does this in seconds, not hours or days, and it can even do it in real time and be forward-looking, so there’s never a gap between the worker being ready and the work being ready. 

Tom Smykowski’s “Jump” To Conclusion: As a developer who did his developing in the days before Agile, I understand the paradox. The more automation you throw at the build process, the farther away you push the people creating the stuff from the reason why they’re creating the stuff. 

And you wind up with garbage out.

The tech middle manager is actually filtering out the garbage in, translating vague demands from executives, customers, even salespeople into actionable work, and shielding developers from constant interruptions. 

Ever see a CEO high on one of his or her ideas like it’s cocaine? I’ve been that CEO.

Without the tech middle manager, every stakeholder has direct digital access to developers, with only AI in between, assigning tickets based on keywords, not the necessary understanding of context or capacity.

Who’s Going To Resend Corporate Communication Emails With “FYI…” at the Top?

Because there’s nothing more efficient than redundancy, right? 

Nothing screams “I’m a gatekeeper, not a leader” more than the forwarding or the “yes”-ing of someone else’s communication. It’s like that kid who stands behind the bully, nodding his head while the bully tells you exactly how he’s going to hand you your ass. 

Tom Smykowski’s “Jump” To Conclusion: I never feel like more of  a corporate tool than when I have to ask a developer or some other tech team player, “Didn’t you see the memo?” 

Most, if not all, companies do top-down communication poorly. Soon, the company goes from “leadership sucks at communicating” to “employees ignore everything leadership communicates.” This practice is almost always shorthand for the tech middle manager to tell the team what the ELT’s real priorities are. It’s an attempt to reinforce the signal buried within the noise. 

I’ll Miss My Friday at 4:30 Weekly Post-Mortem

He actually thinks he’s doing me a favor by scheduling a freaking meeting at freaking 4:30 on a freaking Friday. A meeting to talk about a week that I just want to put behind me so I can get started on dulling the existential pain, so I have the will to come back in on Monday morning.

Tom Smykowski’s “Jump” To Conclusion: Let me tell you youngsters a little story.

Automated Insights – a small company that did some of the first generative AI ever – was a struggling little startup until we landed a contract to provide Yahoo Fantasy Football with automated draft and matchup recaps. Which meant 13 million data-soaked humorous stories generated in the wee hours of every Tuesday morning. 

Yahoo was supposed to sign the contract in February. They dragged their feet until May. Fantasy drafts went into full force at the beginning of August. So we had three months instead of six, and we had 10 people.

I gathered those 10 people into a room and opened my comments by telling them that their summer was going to suck. But if they put everything they had into it, and we got it done, we’d have our names on one of the coolest things ever. Oh, and the company would survive. 

I’ve had two, maybe three experiences of that magnitude over a 30-year career in tech. Most tech workers never get a single one. 

And maybe that tech middle manager isn’t doing anything to get the team over the boredom, the monotony, the thankslessness of most tech roles – fine – but they might be reminding you that, in the moment, in context, what you’re doing is still important.

Someone Has To Staple Those TPS Reports

Yeah, I just went and defended middle management in tech, even its worst tendencies. To be honest, I haven’t accepted a Friday afternoon meeting in 20 years. I’ve been fighting with tech middle managers for decades. But over those decades, I’ve learned their real, overlooked, undercooked value. 

We are indeed going to miss them, because their extinction isn’t their fault. Tech middle managers originally served crucial coordination functions, and a lot of them still do – or did. Tech companies eliminated those roles based on what corporate leadership had slowly turned those roles into: 

• Middle managers became meeting schedulers because leadership wouldn’t give them the real authority they needed.

• They became process enforcers because leadership created those stifling bureaucratic processes to avoid making risky gut decisions.
• They became ticket-shufflers because leadership started rewarding quantity of output, not quality, and thus, forced them to become administrators.

And now that a lot of tech companies are eliminating these tech middle managers, they’re discovering that those coordination functions still need to happen. So it’s either chaos, or executives have to do it themselves in what little time they have, or, more likely, throw AI at it, which will fail spectacularly at the human coordination aspects.

When that chaos hits and the company begins falling apart, will leadership realize who was hoarding all the glue?

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