Tech companies treated management layers as expendable overhead during recent layoff waves, but that assumption misses a critical insight: managers function as organizational infrastructure, not bureaucratic bloat.
Meta, Google, and Amazon led aggressive restructuring campaigns starting in late 2022, cutting managers under the banner of "flattening the org" and "reducing bureaucracy." The logic seemed sound. During the 2021-2022 hiring boom, management ranks swelled alongside headcount growth. Trimming those layers promised faster decision-making and leaner operations.
This framing reflects a persistent tech industry bias toward engineers and product makers. Work that appears directly tied to output gets valued. Work that coordinates, develops, and removes friction gets labeled overhead.
Managers actually perform critical functions that become invisible only when absent. They translate strategy into executable plans. They identify and unblock bottlenecks that paralyze teams. They develop talent, reducing costly turnover. They provide feedback loops that prevent teams from shipping broken products. They make the thousand small decisions daily that allow individual contributors to focus on deep work.
When companies strip management layers too aggressively, individual contributors spend more time in meetings, on status updates, and solving coordination problems themselves. The math looks better on spreadsheets. Organizational velocity collapses in practice.
The tech industry's oscillation between extremes damages performance. Bloated management during the hiring boom created real problems. But the pendulum swing toward skeleton crews creates different problems. Remaining managers inherit unmanageable span of control. Coordination breaks down. Junior employees lack mentorship. Good people leave because their growth stalled.
The lesson isn't that management layers can't bloat or that bureaucracy shouldn't get questioned. It's that management, at appropriate levels, enables organizational function. Like power grids or network infrastructure, they work best when they're reliable and mostly invisible. When they fail