According to Ram Shriram, there’s not enough middle managers out there. I also heard this meme from three sales executives in a speaker panel organized by one of my professors the other week.
Memories must be short around the Valley. Remember what happened a few years ago? The big tech bubble bust. Companies cut headcount and went out of business in droves. That cut the guts out of a lot of people’s careers. An awful lot of the folks who should have spent 2001-2006 working their way up into those middle-management roles instead struggled to find work, got out of the business altogether, hunkered down in survival jobs, moved out of the area, or stagnated in roles they were overqualified for. Others went into their own startups or have made the leap to the executive level. At any rate, now that things are better, there’s a great big hole in a lot of people’s careers where the last 5 years should have been.
The real question is, why are any of these executives surprised by this?
Although to be fair, Shriram is not quoted as being surprised, so it might be incorrect to suggest that.
Maybe someone should rewrite that old folk song ‘Where have all the flowers gone’ and turn it into a YouTube video to help raise awareness of this critical business issue. What do you think?