Amazon Layoffs: Amazon is reportedly planning to reduce 14,000 managerial positions by early next year in a bid to save $3 billion annually, according to a Morgan Stanley report. This initiative is part of CEO Andy Jassy’s strategy to boost operational efficiency by increasing the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15 per cent by March 2025.
Middle management deserves everything it gets.
Upper management deserves everything it gets. Middle management is often underpaid and expected to do all the jobs of their own plus their superiors.
Some *organisational tasks will always be needed. Middle management does that plus fielding some amount of customer service, plus a lot of what upper management takes credit for.
The system is fucked, but we shouldn’t let the people doing barely anything to earn their yachts turn us against those grinding their own bones to glue the grind-house together.
(No, I’m not a middle-manager.)
If you take a job shoveling shit, am I supposed to feel bad for you when you shovel shit?
I think my job is technically a middle manager at this point?
The reality is that the priorities come straight from the top, people in my team are mostly self-organised unless the tasks they choose were to be wildly misaligned with company milestones (which in practice never happens) or people have questions about what needs tackling first or when by, and I’m mostly a technical unblocker that jumps into the hardest or slowest moving technical challenges.
My point to all of this - “middle manager” is a wildly different concept in every company. Nobody likes a pen pusher with no knowledge, but also no company hires people into the title of “middle manager” hoping they’ll boss people around cluelessly. If that happens and that role exists, something has gone clearly wrong IMO.
They’re fucking climbers. Every middle manager takes the job because they want to be upper management someday. Zero sympathy.
I’m gonna make what I consider to be an important distinction here, but I also want to say I mostly agree with you and I’m bummed by the downvotes.
I think we can lump the middle manager into two broad “types”. And you seem to be exclusively describing one of the two types - the one that’s, frankly, smart and “aware” enough to realize that middle management is trash, rank and file is trash, and they know precisely why they are aiming to get above everyone. It ain’t cuz they want to help, of course, and they never intend to. Fuck those people every possible way, because not only do they understand that the purpose of middle management is to be the buffer between the owners and the laborers, they also have decided - with full awareness! - fuck the laborers, I want to be good with the owners.
But there’s another, sadder kind of middle manager, and I think maybe your hostility is unkind and unfair to this type. This middle manager still has the wool pulled over their eyes, they really think if they work hard and do well, they’ll be rewarded! And hey, isn’t the fact that they’ve been promoted (!) to leadership a clear indicator that they’re doing things right? Just gotta keep at it, the really important people keep telling me this is what they like to see, I’ll finally be able to get all these bills paid / improve my life! I’m on the way up, finally.
And then that person says “YEESH managing this store is really hard, I’ve gotta get better at this. My leadership doesn’t seem to think this should be a struggle…”
Etc., etc., for 10, 20 years as the wool gradually falls from their eyes. Not everyone is able to see things as clearly as you are. Most middle managers, I think, are basically suckers. Naive and exploited. The rest, tho, are basically monsters without enough power to be monsters. No argument there, and fuck those people.
I’m gonna assume you don’t know any better. Not saying there aren’t bad or stupid middle managers, but usually the middle manager is the person who got shoved into a “management” position they probably didn’t want, and all they really get to do is take all the heat when decisions they didn’t make blow up in their face. It also usually comes with false promises of raises but upper management never really intends on giving it.
It’s like, top level squeezing the bottom out 101.
I’m pretty fucking sure you still have to apply to become a middle manager. You don’t just evolve like a Pokemon.
They voluntarily became the manager’s gofers because they’re disgusting climbers and they get what they deserve. 🙂
I feel like all of your knowledge about “middle management” is derived from The Office.
I’m pretty fucking sure it doesn’t work like that outside of your black and white interpretation.
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, I’m saying a lot of people find themselves in that (bad) situation either outside their control, or they can be manipulated, coerced, pressured, or hell use your imagination.
To be clear, it’s definitely not always “oh so-and-so was so obsessed with climbing the ladder that they became the bosses bitch, Oooo.” Thats a kindergarden take and, IMO, helps empower people at the top hoarding all the wealth.
Managers at every level exist to protect the boss’s wealth and extract the surplus value we create with our labor. They’re slave drivers for the wage slaves.
News flash: managers at every level also think of themselves as victims and they always pass that on down the chain of command. Upper management gets screamed at by senior management, then they scream at middle management, and then the people on the ground get screamed at. Shit rolls down hill. They aren’t always looking to get promoted all the way to the top, but every single one of them wants to be promoted higher than the rest of us so they can get a little more of the surplus value we generate.
If their job as middle management is so fucking hard how about they give it up? Accept a demotion and rejoin us on the floor. No one has to be middle management.
A lot of us here work in software. Often times there are two tracks, IC and people management. Often times both of those tracks pay similarly.
The good people managers and directors are usually folk that were identified as being good at mentoring people and good at providing air cover so people could do good work.
I’m sorry you’ve never worked at a place with good middle management. It does exist in many places, and many people selected it because they like working with the people and the strategy more than the product directly. Often times these people could’ve been paid comparably by working as a staff or principal track engineer or experience designer.