Alex Butterworth saw it coming. The senior legal counsel at Uber (UBER) figured that sooner or later a round of layoffs might catch him, and this month one did, as Uber cut back on small-team managers. The risk hadn’t kept him up at night, and the reason is the most useful detail in the story: ample savings, no dependents and a second income as a restaurant investor. Now he’s targeting general-counsel jobs at startups, unsure he wants another round in the corporate middle.
Butterworth is the human face of Wednesday’s On the Clock column, in which the Journal’s Callum Borchers argues that companies are misjudging what middle managers are worth. Uber, Intel (INTC), Coinbase (COIN) and others are cutting a layer that executives see as a drag on speed and front-line workers love to grumble about. Borchers’s prediction: once companies realize what they’ve lost, middle manager becomes the hottest job going, and a hard one to fill. Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce projects a U.S. shortage of 2.9 million managers in 2032, by far the most of any major job category, ahead of nurses (611,000) and teachers (362,000).
A reluctant bench
Refilling those seats won’t be simple. Even top-tier M.B.A. grads are having trouble landing jobs, management often comes as a promotion with more duties, no raise and less security, and stepping up right now can look like signing up to go first in the next round of cuts. Butterworth concedes that some promoted individual contributors can’t manage and slow everyone down. His complaint is the method: when companies don’t have the time or patience to remove the right people, he says, “they just take a sledgehammer to the organization.”
Technology is the new wrinkle. Economist David Deming, dean of Harvard College, notes that managers don’t produce output themselves; they coordinate resources, and software can now do that decently, chatbots embedded in Slack among them. A separate Wednesday story on startups using AI to stay small cites LinkedIn data: startups founded in 2022 with at least five people averaged 20.7 employees by year three, against 32.5 for the 2018 class. Borchers’s rebuttal is everything that doesn’t show up in a workflow — managers as informal therapists, translators of strategy and buffers who keep petty problems off executives’ desks.
Our read
The column is about companies, but the lesson is personal, and Butterworth has already lived it (M5, cash flow). His security wasn’t the title; it was the savings and second income that let him accept the risk before the ax fell. For anyone in a middle seat, that means an emergency fund sized for a real job search at your level rather than a two-week gap, plus at least one income stream the org chart can’t touch. It’s also why a promotion should be priced like the trade it is: more duties for no raise and less security is a cost, and it deserves a number before it gets a yes.
If Borchers is right and the shortage arrives, the people with sharp management skills and enough cash to wait for the right offer are the ones likely to set the terms. That’s a stronger hand than hoping the next reorganization skips you. And if your cushion is a guess, fifteen minutes with your statements will turn it into a number.