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‘I didn’t want to be the guinea pig’: inside tech’s AI-fueled manager purge
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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Technology
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On one hand, all these redundant middle manager jobs are the ones that should be done away with. Although they shouldn't be replaced by AI. Their jobs were probably already better replaced by a script or Excel spreadsheet.
On the other hand, these business leaders don't have enough common sense to restructure roles and responsibilities after this big a shakeup, and the workers will be the ones stuck carrying the extra burden.
There's still a role for actual managers - as coaches, doing recruitment, getting people into useful apprenticeships, helping them improve, developing them into standalone craftspersons.
And as people who can sit above the day-to-day workflows and make improvements, shutdown production lines for maintenance and so on. Adapt the working system to the people they have to try to get the most out of it. Bring in a new system, parallel run it on small scale (fucking test it), manage a roll out.
But in my experience managers are not selected to have those skills (which maybe quite rare), nor asked to perform those functions.
And when a large organisation sees something go wrong - possibly because of a lack of those things - they just recruit more jargon filled middle managers to argue about it deflect blame or steal credit. Or commission a consultant report to tell them nothing. They're more like overseers at best.
The actual decent managers will admit when they made a mistake; that's rarely given the respect it deserves.