Great Flattening Middle Manager Hats

Amazon cut 14,000 roles in October 2025. Block cut 4,000 in February 2026. Meta terminated 8,000 and moved 7,000 more to AI work. Oracle cut somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000, about 18% of its workforce. The layer being removed each time was middle management, and the freed budget went to compute. Fortune named it the Great Flattening and the label stuck. The other half of the story is that nobody is fighting for the job. Robert Walters found 52% of Gen Z professionals do not want a middle-management role and 69% call it high stress for low reward. Only 6% want senior leadership at all. They watched what happened to the last cohort and drew the obvious conclusion. Meanwhile the survivors are absorbing the gap, which is why MY MANAGER'S MANAGER IS ALSO MY MANAGER is not a joke so much as an org chart. Corporate humour lives or dies on delivery, so most of this set is PT Serif, which reads like something submitted in writing rather than shouted. PLEASE DO NOT PROMOTE ME is a complete, polite, career-limiting sentence, and that is the whole bit. Navy, stone and light blue on purpose. The blandness is load-bearing.