Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc.

ARGUABLY THE WORST spot to be on the org chart right now is in middle management, bearing the brunt of the AI-era layoffs — middle managers made up nearly a quarter of all job cuts in 2025.

And somehow, arguably the best place to be in seven to 10 years might be the now-gaping hole where middle management used to be, says one study, casting some doubt on the current middle-manager purge in the economy: Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce projects the U.S. will be short 2.9 million managers by 2032 — bigger than nurses and teachers combined.

Everywhere you look, middle managers are being handed their walking papers. Uber axed about 3,300 employees this month, mostly middle managers; Intel halved its management layers from 12 to six; Google cut small-team managers by 35 per cent. Coinbase told staff there would be no more “pure managers” (managers should be like “player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams,” wrote CEO Brian Armstrong); and Airbnb’s Brian Chesky doubted “people managers will have any value in the future.”

There are middle manager defenders in the wild, some who see the current assault on the middle layer a hit to a unique asset class in many firms, seeing smartness and not bloat when they look at middle management.

“Management is sort of a unique category in that there isn’t a single pipeline that gets you there,” said policy analyst Madeleine Adelson, co-author of the Georgetown Workforce & Skills Shortage Report. “That can work both for and against it.”

The common narrative is that middle managers are the layer at many companies where AI is having the most impact. But whether any of this is really about AI is a fair question. Uber’s layoff memo talked about “layers” and “complexity” but never once mentioned AI, suggesting its hostility towards middle management is, whatever else you think of it, arrived at organically.

“There’s a bit of AI washing,” said Toby Walsh, chief scientist at the UNSW AI Institute. “A company that’s been perhaps not very well managed, and rather than saying that we’ve been poorly managed, they’ve been saying: ‘Well, we're investing in AI.’’

So, maybe it’s AI, or maybe it is firms fighting the spectre of thinning margins by taking, as laid-off Uber legal counsel Alex Butterworth put it, “a sledgehammer to the organization and put the pieces back together later.”

Either way, we’re probably going to miss them, argue critics of the middle manager purge. The pipeline is already drying up. About half of Gen Z workers say they never want to rise to middle management, and you can’t really look at the current economy and blame them. “Where are those middle managers and higher managers going to come from?” asks Walsh. “Where are they going to learn about the business?”

All of this has The Wall Street Journal’s Callum Borchers predicting a middle manager renaissance in a few years. “Get ready for the in-demand middle managers’ comeback tour in a few years’ time. The only question is, when companies realize they cut too deeply, will there be enough bosses willing and able to step up?”

CULTURE

Everyone’s got a thing

The C-suite loves its peptides; the tech bros are smoking again. Proceed at your own risk

FOR THE MODERN executive, the gig is hell sometimes. Tariffs are messing with supply chains, the market can turn on a headline and AI is doing AI things (possibly, we humans only have a few years left on earth, which is really going to mess with Q4 2031).

You can control your own bloodstream, though, which is another way of saying, you can certainly inject yourself with peptides in an attempt, desperate or not, to optimize oneself physically.

Peptides (short chains of amino acids that regulate things like muscle growth, energy and sleep) are increasingly being touted as “miracle elixirs,” as one Inc. writer put it. They exist in the realm of banned substances in the athletics world, and so they have found a new market elsewhere. “The target market, once dominated by fitness gurus, billionaires and biohackers, is increasingly shifting toward executives and entrepreneurs,” wrote Sam Blum.

If you’re a high-signal business guy (and, honestly, a great proportion of the peptide fans — or at least the loudest ones — do seem to be men) chances are they’re sloshing around your professional circles. “For a founder managing a $5-million-plus company or a CEO responsible for hundreds of employees, declining energy or slower recovery is far from a minor inconvenience,” reads one executive health clinic blog. “It’s a significant constraint on your output, decision quality and long-term enterprise value.”

All of that is of dubious value health-wise, but as a marketing pitch, it seems to be working, given the interest many are taking in peptide-based optimization. “Silicon Valley is on a wellness bender,” said Business Insider’s Henry Chandonnet. “Techies are sleepmaxxing, cold-plunging and hosting peptide parties.”

And yet, a counterculture of younger tech workers has taken a rather different approach to the same professional stress: they’re smoking cigarettes.

Stephen Campbell, the 27-year-old cofounder of startup Revamp AI, told Business Insider his best networking happens over a pack of darts. “When you’re smoking, you’re networking by accident,” Campbell said. He’s hired employees after sharing cigarettes with them; one of his biggest deals, he explained, got started while chain-smoking in a Shenzhen karaoke lounge (an experience I’m sure we’re accustomed to).

Jake Jolis, a general partner at Zeno Ventures, said the smoking founders “laissez-faire attitude” sets them apart from the “central casting, ruffle no feathers, middle of the road” founders. Hoodies and flip flops — so 2010s. Cigarettes are back in, haven't you heard.

Avi Schiffmann, the 23-year-old founder of the AI wearable Friend, lights up during camera-off work meetings. “By the time you do get lung cancer, our AI robots are supposed to have cured that,” Schiffmann reasoned (offering a somewhat insightful view into Gen Z thinking.)

CAREERS

The career ladder is dead. Long live the jungle gym

The career ladder is gone — here’s what to climb instead

WITH THE STATE of the job market, entry level or otherwise, leaders in the corporate system are realizing something: you can’t really call it a career ladder if it no longer reliably points upwards.

What’s taken its place is a growing arms race for the next metaphor: you could have a career that looks like ‘climbing wall’. Or a ‘jungle gym’. One London Business School professor says it’s more like a woven tapestry. But hey all agree on only one thing: the career ladder is toast.

Corporate executives are grasping for these new expressions as they struggle to explain what a career looks like, right at a time when young people, especially, are looking to the ranks of business leaders to reassure them that careers aren’t completely dead (hence, metaphors like climbing walls).

“Unlike other moments of disruption, it isn’t coming from the top down," LinkedIn's Aneesh Raman told Business Insider. “Workers are going to be climbing a wall, not a ladder.”

This is nice branding, but Raman’s metaphor also implies there’s no set path to take you up — it’s something you need to figure out for yourself. “No one is going to come knock on your door and say, ‘We’ve figured out what your job is in the AI era.’ You’re going to have to figure that out.”

Other business leaders have adopted separate metaphors, most of them serving the same rhetorical duty that Raman’s does. Lattice CEO Sarah Franklin, for instance, takes a more playful approach: “Your career is not a ladder. It’s a jungle gym,” she told Reuters. Pfizer's Anne Kennedy Dotson went with luggage as a metaphor for skills. “Every single thing you learn goes into this suitcase [and] you pull it out at different times when it becomes relevant,” she said at a Charter summit.

Lynda Gratton, a professor at the London Business School and the author of Living the 100-Year Life, has her own spin. Consider the idea of a career like a woven tapestry: eight threads (mastery, cooperation, calm, adventure, and so on) that you spend a career strengthening and repairing.

“The real fundamental problem with the ladder is that you think the only way is up, and if you haven’t gone up, then you have failed,” she reasoned. “Over a working life you will strengthen these threads, neglect them, repair or reweave them. No one else has your exact pattern. Your fabric is uniquely yours.”

AI

Are ‘slop grenades’ filling your comms?

Shopify’s CEO mandated that staff prove AI couldn’t replace them before new hires were approved. Now he has a name for what that policy produced, and it is not a compliment

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