20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers

I'm at LI and my reporting chain is Sr mgr > Sr Director > VP > Sr vp > CEO.

A year ago it was mgr > sr mgr > director > sr Director> vp> svp > ceo.

No one in my management chain was impacted but the flattening has been happening organically as folks leave. LI has a distinctive lack of chill right now contrary to the company image, but generally things are just moving faster.

Speaking as someone who has been a "middle manager":

I've seen a trend where a company is trying to do WAY too much outside of their core competencies or too many things at the same time.

A strong temptation is to to just say "well, we will just hire a bunch of managers to oversee each project we are working on b/c having 17 direct reports who are front line employees is too many people."

Then, times get tough and you think: "Well we can't fire X b/c they are the front line employee actually doing the work for Project Make Money so we'll just fire their manager. The manager manager will just have to deal with having 19 direct reports again"

I have a long held belief that engineering managers are mostly a scam, and are actually just overpaid scrum masters. This is from working at some top companies

firing entire levels of middle management seems to be a fashion these days, but from experience in my org it has been counterproductive. my current manager now has >60 direct reports so can’t even find the time to handle each of our basic hr tasks, let alone provide any leadership.

in theory i can see the board salivating to pretend they are elon but in practice it’s a dysfunctional nightmare.

plus it’s bad for ic morale because there is now no path forward for advancing our careers to the managerial level.

I am dying to leave the management track and go back to SDE. Pretty much every company out there bloated their ranks to include more middle managers and it became an unbearable mess. After 12 years in management, though, I can't get interviews for SDE, so I am kind of stuck. Imagine writing code for a living? DREAM.

Typical ratio of people to managers in a company is about 1:4, so that tracks.

And before this becomes controversial, I don’t mean every manager has 4 reports, but because organization is a tree, for every 4 ICs, there’s one manager.

For example, you could have 3PMs, 3 designers and 10 engineers, but the org could have 4 managers: 1 PM manager, 1 Design manager, 1 eng manager with 7 reportees and a sr manager with 3 engineers & the 3 managers reporting to him/her.

Managerial bloat tends to lack a short term counter balance. Boom/Bust cycles seem to emerge.

Personally I wish we needed fewer managers but I often see their necessity.

Yeah, Zuck seems to have set the trend of eliminating a lot of middle managers.

I bet most of the rest are also managers in practice, although they might have had different titles.

Tech companies are full of managers and very few people actually doing engineering. The incentive structures are mismatched since most management practices come from manufacturing or service industries.

What’s the fan out at LinkedIn? Is 20% proportional to the direct contributors or higher or lower?

I don't think it's that weird.

In a boom cycle, it's not a great use of resources to try to really tighten up the manger/report ratios because the size of the org because the slack lets you grow faster. The higher the growth, the more managers at a more inefficient manager/report ratio generally.

Certain orgs in LinkedIn were growing really fast. Now they're not and they know the headcount for the next year, time to ratchet down the number of managers to get a more steady, cost-efficient ratio.

I see this discussion has gone deep into so called technical managers and their effectiveness, even their necessity. I feel there is no clear answer possible. We are trying to objectively analyse what is not objective in the first place. Before we discuss necessity of some role we need to define it. Who is a good technical manager? What do they bring to the table? Definitions anyone? I can try but it will be subjective. I am sure there are different sets of opinions around what %mentoring and IC they should do. In fact, can we even define software engineering role and standards? Someone who writes code to solve a problem? To me a good one will write concise code thats easy to change making good use of available tools and paradigms. I have already used several vague terms. My point being, we are in a profession where entry barriers are low. Role responsibilities and standard of good work are contextual and opinionated. That has a direct impact on your experience with peers and managers. You are not always going to approve of the number of managers, their level of tech involvement etc. Have clarity on what you can tolerate and what you cannot compromise on.

When I was working in local government my team, that I was 1 of, had two permanent staff with 7* managers above us.

I was lucky for most of the time I had a great TL and a great manager so I had immediate and mid level buffers to shield me from most of office politics.

When that went away, I went soon after. Who willingly would deal with nutters. Not for that pay.

I see all the comments about how managers are necessary. Let’s assume we can automate more and more HR tasks, what are managers required for besides that?

That tracks if 80% were then engineers based on generic org structures. Isn’t this expected?

Given that the recommended number of reports is about 5, this seems about right.

1 in 6 people in Nokia are/were managers so the ratio sounds about right.

Sounds a bit like there was some delayering.

And LI has recently been rated BBB- by BBB.

Just a lot of people on this thread who’ve never run a company talking about how many manager you need to run a company.

Source?

Tell HN:

wsa31e`

I am really sorry for all those who have lost their job today.

There seems to be a lot of negative view about managers here.

If I had to judge managers by my experience at my first job, I would be first in the line decrying them. But, now I see that is the result of faulty processes, promoting too early and for all the wrong reasons.

In my second job, my manager was my strength. We didn't have much meetings, rather lots of one-on-ones or 3-4 people discussing. Most of us were just out of college. So, when we had strong opinions on the product features, they not only heard us, but helped formulate a proper argument that we could present. He was also a good mentor, helping me reframe my viewpoint, when I didn't agree with one of my very senior colleagues (Later turned out the senior colleague was right. In retrospect, I really pity that colleague for he had to work with a big bunch of naive college graduates with no coding discipline :) )

It helps that the whole environment in the company was one of openness, camaraderie and a real desire to make a difference. But a good manager can always make a great difference in your work and happiness.

Manager is the one who can't code, love meetings (part of their job), love Office (so they won't get boring for doing reporting all day).