It’s been less than a year since I wrote this piece about engineering leadership inside a delayered organization.  Here’s what I’ve learned since then.

When your rollup goes from 7 to 14 to 21 (or more) direct reports in short order, something has to give.  What gives first is actually developing the people who report to you.

Delayering isn’t just a management inconvenience.  It breaks the leadership pipeline.

In a healthy organization, people leadership starts small—a handful of reports, room to make mistakes—and learn from them, space to coach and be coached.  Delayering eliminates that entirely.  In my last organization, people leadership now starts with responsibility for two engineering teams.  There is no shallow end of the pool anymore.

The way my last organization implemented delayering, team leads were turned into individual contributors with little warning beyond rumors on Blind.  Imagine the whiplash of being promoted to lead a team in January only to be converted to a lead IC just a few months later.  Nearly a year after implementation, there are still no clear growth paths or guidance to the next level for dozens of people in my line of business alone who went from being team leads with responsibilities for helping their direct reports shape their careers to individual contributors. 

The ripple effects of delayering are real:

* 1:1 time shrinks.  Feedback gets less tactically useful because the manager is too far from the work.

* aspiring leaders never get to test whether leadership is for them before being thrown into the deep end.

* senior ICs have to absorb mentoring responsibilities that aren’t formally recognized or rewarded.

* existing leaders get stretched until they break—and the institutional knowledge walks out with them.

The companies that leaned first and hardest into delayering (Meta in 2023, Amazon from 2024 to the present) have not obviously improved their products.  In Amazon’s case, the combination of delayering, layoffs, and ramped-up GenAI usage has led directly to more frequent and severe production incidents.  The already-fleeting margin improvements of delayering may yet turn into losses as a result.

When I evaluate my next role, among my first questions will be whether the professional growth of direct reports is a genuine leadership priority—not a talking point.