Is AI Going to Turn Us All Into Middle Managers?

The narrative that AI is driving mass tech layoffs obscures an important timeline: the cuts began in early 2022, six months before ChatGPT's release. In 2021 and early 2022, junior engineers commanded $200,000–$300,000 offers and could walk across the street for better deals, creating what some companies called «chief vibes officer» roles to retain talent. Executives were openly frustrated by workers they perceived as entitled.

The layoffs that followed — over half a million in tech alone — functioned as a market recalibration, making workers «skittish» about leaving and more «grateful» for the jobs they had. AI became a convenient narrative overlay for cuts that were fundamentally about reasserting management power. The Nightingales note that even ChatGPT at launch «couldn't count how many Rs there were in Strawberry» — hardly a justification for wholesale restructuring.

What's emerged is a labor market defined by low hiring and low firing, with college graduate unemployment for ages 22–27 reaching 5.6% and over 40% of employed recent graduates working jobs that don't require degrees. The anxiety is palpable, but its roots predate the AI boom by months.

When people describe their best times at work, the stories invariably include other people. Not the boss, necessarily — there are plenty of bad bosses — but colleagues who saw them, collaborated with them, challenged them, or simply shared coffee and conversation. This is the fundamental disconnect in Silicon Valley's vision of billion-dollar one-person companies orchestrating agent swarms.

The Nightingales see this empirically: ask anyone about a moment at work that really mattered, and they'll describe a boss who saw their potential and helped unlock the next stage of their career, or a team that supported them when the rest of life felt rocky. Work provides stability, identity, and community for people who no longer live near relatives, don't belong to churches or civic groups, and have seen most «third spaces» erode.

When tech executives sell a future where «you don't need colleagues anymore,» they're not offering liberation from drudgery — they're threatening to eliminate the last remaining place where many people spend meaningful time with others. The sales pitch reveals its own weakness: it's only compelling if you're annoyed at paying junior engineers $300,000 and want to replace them, not if you actually value what humans bring to collaborative work.

Robert Putnam's «Bowling Alone» documented the decline of rotary clubs, churches, and civic associations — the traditional glue of American community. Through all that erosion, work remained: the one place people spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, around others who see them and appreciate their contributions. Managers began reporting two years ago that geographically distributed teams were experiencing «wobbly» wellness issues — not performance problems, exactly, but a concerning drift in employees who rarely interacted with colleagues.

The Nightingales call work «the last bastion» of connection. When that falls apart, there is no backstop. We don't live near relatives anymore. We've set up lives with chosen family but lost the baked-in answers for human contact that previous generations had. For many, work became the default answer: where you had to show up, socialize, «put on your hard pants,» and interact even when you didn't feel like it.

Depersonalizing work through AI — making it transactional, removing the messy human elements — might sound appealing to burned-out employees who've been exploited by the system. But the Nightingales consistently find that people who claim they don't care anymore about work often find their way back to caring once given the right role and team. Humans are social creatures at our core. The question is whether we'll design work systems that acknowledge that reality or pretend it away in service of efficiency.