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

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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.

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

"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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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. :(

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.