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<p>I completely disagree with this statement. </p>
<p>I work as a systems engineer for a well known airline ticket information systems company (i.e. the management of information regarding tickets sales in the hospitality and travel industries) and the upper tier of management and often the middle management get changed out every 6 months. Many of the engineers who are responsible for and know the INs and OUTs of current systems are treated very well and are not laid off. Granted, the company is very large and has 100s of huge individual systems that all talk to each other, so replacing the engineer that has worked there for 10 years is going to be a lot more difficult than replacing some middle manager or even a upper tier manager such as a VP. The complexity of large-scale systems has more of a cost of replacement than some manager in an office pushing paper. [ The exception of course are those managers that manage client relationships which could end up costing the business revenue. ]</p>
<p>In fact, just this last month, there was a massive layoff where an entire level of middle management got eliminated. Only about 5 engineers were laid off in comparison to the 100s of managers that got laid off. I suspect this is due to the fact that most of the management is done by the lead engineers over the various systems. What does a middle manager really do if they aren’t working in the trenches on the actual product? They push paper, send emails, coordinate meetings, and other BS that can be done by the lead engineer. Lead engineers tend to operate at the high level anyway and oversee a project as a whole and will create meetings only when they are necessary and not to justify their existence like some middle managers. If the lead engineer doesn’t have time, the company can hire an administrative assistant to handle the rest of the busy office work. Of course, SOME middle management is necessary, but I say a lot of it is redundant and the salaries are way too high for the services they are providing the company.</p>
<p>I just found this forum a few days ago. The various threads here in the engineering forum and the USC forum are quite stimulating. I look to post here more in the future.</p>
<p>–Diode four nine four.</p>