The ‘Great Flattening’ rolls on as Uber lays off middle managers

Uber is reducing its workforce by 10%, or about 3,300 workers, in its largest job cuts since the pandemic, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced yesterday. The changes, which follow a period of solid growth at the ride-sharing giant, are intended to speed up decision-making by reducing the number of management layers, Khosrowshahi wrote in a memo to employees. The number of workers who sit seven or more layers from the CEO has fallen by 20%, and the number of “micro-teams” with only one or two reports has been cut nearly in half. The restructuring is further evidence that the so-called Great Flattening – the trend in the corporate world toward reducing layers of middle management – shows no signs of slowing down. In recent years, companies like Meta, Amazon, Google and Microsoft have aggressively eliminated managerial roles on the belief that, in the words of Mark Zuckerberg, “flatter is faster.” Spurred on by the rise of artificial intelligence, the Great Flattening has already reshaped the workforce dramatically. Overall, the average number of people reporting to managers has increased from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025 and is up nearly 50% since 2013, according to Gallup. In Korn Ferr…