Too Many Managers.
Layoffs, re-orgs, & moving forward.
“People management is easy.”
“I’m a people person, I just need to land this position to show my abilities.”
These are all inflated exaggerations that have spread throughout the past decade.
The idea of promotions used to be tied to more responsibilities and more impact, but now promotions have become synonymous with two words: “people management”.
A large part is due to chasing status. People management is seen as prestigious, important, and even “easy”. Saying you’ve been promoted to a Principal level position doesn’t carry the same weight as telling your parents:
“I’m a Director and manage a team of thirty people”
—even if a Principal level position has more impact and compensation.
A large part of this is due to the measurement of impact, as there are two main ways to measure impact: over numbers and over people.
Did you scale revenues from zero to $10M, or scale the team from 5 to 50 people?
Some degree of this is due to human nature. At some point, dollar impact becomes unable to visualize for people(the human brain is not so good at large numbers) so we define success in terms of people managed.
Most people believe a high headcount is a sign of a successful company, but the truth is a high headcount is a sign of an ineffective company.
When Excel came out, it was no longer important to communicate value in terms of people employed for your finance operations. Quite the contrary, high numbers of people employed was a sign you had too many people in the office furiously scribbling with paper, pens, and calculators— instead of buying Excel licenses.
Now, we’re beginning to see a shift in valuing high headcounts.
Companies like Twitter have downsized from 7,500 to around 2,300 employees at the time of writing and big tech is axing middle managers.
As a result, we’ve seen the lower-middle management of group managers and directors consolidate.
Most people believe you measure people management skills by your ability to “develop people” and make them “feel good”, but the truth is while this is important for culture, you measure people management skills by team results first.
While times were good, big tech promoted people that were great at playing office politics into people manager roles, but the truth is office politics often do not translate into team results.
Contrary to belief, Google and Meta are not dunces pulling lots to decide who to lay off, they are making data-driven decisions to lay off those who cannot perform.
Many people believe managers being fired from tech are being fired at random, but the truth is the majority are being fired because they are ineffective.
So where do we go from here?
Through the chaos, we have seen a lot of re-orging.
While this writing may seem to be ripping on the people management track a bit, there are a lot of managers out there that are *absolutely stellar*.
As a result, a lot of great people managers have actually absorbed reports, with many talented directors being promoted to senior directors(with additional compensation).
Individual Contributors or ICs — are members of the organization with no direct reports. Due to the heightened status of people management, their work has been discounted for the last few years.
With the recent changes, people will come around to the idea of being a high-level IC again as a viable career track, because there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being the well-respected high-level IC who works on big-impact projects and carries large responsibilities.
People will eventually take the medicine… because while most people believe they are “good” managers, the truth is they are far more effective as high-level individual contributors(ICs).
Interestingly, we are beginning to see high-level ICs who traditionally have taken on a role with no direct reports now beginning to mentor and train 1-2 younger ICs in addition to their IC responsibilities— a healthy trend I believe will continue into the long term.
The real unfortunate cases in this recent turn of events are new hires just beginning their careers in IC roles. Many of these hires have 0 to 5 years of experience, and not every company is willing to nurture them to their full potential in the face of uncertainty.
As such, many companies have decided to consolidate their junior IC responsibilities into senior IC power players in the interest of efficiency.
It goes without saying that many entry-level ICs have also been let go due to being unable to perform, but many were simply let go because when the going gets tough— you power up investment into your proven heavy hitters.
So re-evaluate your org, look in the mirror, and ask: Is this person most effective as a manager or an IC?
You’ll find the truth tends to be the latter.