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Comment by apwell23 | Hacker News Reader

This is all over news but is this actually true. Meta is always citied as example because Mark said and did bunch of things to appease the markets.

There are no reduction in numbers at meta now. Middle managers have made a comeback at meta big time. CEOs love middle managers despite what they say to investors.

Even the numbers cited in the article are not convincing

> middle-manager head counts by about 6% since the peak of their pandemic hiring sprees

This actually indicates the opposite that middle managment is unusually resilient to layoffs

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Why would Mark care about appeasing the market? He has a controlling interest in Meta and can’t be fired no matter what the market thinks.

You can accuse Meta of a lot of things. But being short term focused is not one.

> Why would Mark care about appeasing the market?

you mean he doesn't care what the meta stock price is ?

then I don't have a theory why mark claimed to cut middle management in 'year of efficiency' but didn't actually do it.

I can’t find numbers for 2024. But as of the end of 2023, they still have more employees than they did in 2020.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-faceboo...

Middle management gets a bad rap but that political battleground makes or break companies.

Exactly. Not having political battlegrounds makes companies better. Whereas, it sounds like you're saying having people to fight in the battleground is the goal.

I think what the previous post meant was that a political battleground always exists, not that middle managers create them. If you think they don't, you're telling me your role in the organization without telling me your role.

Those battles will always exist and need to be fought.

I just always assumed middle management purpose is to insulate upper management from any bad consequences of the actual business.

Like there is a dispersion process of responsibility of the actual business as you go up the chain so if you have enough layers you can basically free roll as an upper manager with taking credit for the good outcomes while the bad was just shitty middle management.

It is an investment by upper manager to free roll.

battleground is another name for markets

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