It’s a fateful coincidence that 2 of the most consequential social networks of the past decade—Twitter and Facebook—have undergone substantial layoffs in the past year, for different reasons. At the same time, the CEOs of both companies have called for flatter organizational structures, particularly within their massive engineering teams: engineering managers are asked to write code again, and otherwise take on many more direct reports than the accepted conventional wisdom of 6–8 engineers.
Now, this might just be the how trends cycle in and out of popularity, but we’ve tried this system of little-to-no-management before. Early-stage Google and Github were skeptical of managers and resisted corporate hierarchies for a time, while Zappos went in a completely different direction at the insistence of its former CEO; eventually these companies migrated back towards more traditional organizational structures. In fact, much of the discourse and focus in people management—especially engineering management—in the last few years have come about as a direct response to the fallow resources prior1.
This pullback may well be the reaction to the overreaction, or at least a contrarian maneuver against established norms. Add enough layers of management, and the environment will inevitably create inter-team politics and bureaucracy even with the best of intentions. Deliverables in the form of code and product feel more tangible—as much as software can be said to be tangible—than OKRs and performance reviews.
To be clear, I’m not advocating for abandoning management. If there is a movement abound for fewer managers, though, it’s borne as a response to our current macroeconomic conditions, inexorably linked to the layoffs and retrenchment these companies are undertaking at the same time. It’s akin to the ol’ Silicon Valley dichotomy between peacetime and wartime management: each situation demands its own playbook, focus, and execution.
And to lean into the comparison further: in times of peaceful abundance, the industry can take on a life of its own. Peacetime creates the space for the discipline—be it business or people management—to organically expand, and new practitioners provide a necessary and captive audience. In wartime, these luxuries fall away; in fact, companies seem to be biasing their layoffs towards less experienced engineers, which makes sense with a flatter organization. The main way to maintain productivity is to lean more heavily on senior engineers, and trust that their experience and autonomy closes the management deficit.
That said, even as I think that it can make sense for some teams to remove layers of management, I also don’t think this is a long-term sustainable or desirable state. Businesses in survival mode have to make do with fewer resources, but the eventual goal is to grow out of being unhealthily lean. Analogous to how AI may squeeze out junior engineers by replacing some of their early-career skillset development, the lack of managerial support will starve a cohort of inexperienced developers and shrink the future pipeline of senior devs.
Some of the groups I’ve worked with, like ELC and Plato, are a part of this movement.↩
