The Glory Days of the Cabin
Growing up in Navi Mumbai some twenty-odd years ago, I used to watch my father—a civil engineer in a government company—and marvel at what it meant to be a manager. He had climbed the ranks to a senior project management position, complete with his own dedicated cabin. When I naively asked him if he actually did the construction work, he laughed; laborers and masons did the heavy lifting, while junior engineers drew the plans and guided the execution. My father’s job? Handling conflicts and having the final word. Nothing moved without his signature. He was the ultimate gatekeeper of accountability, bearing the brunt if a contractor messed up, but he was completely divorced from the physical grind.
For the longest time, that was the corporate dream. You grinded for the first four to seven years of your career, and your reward was becoming a manager. You scored a team, maybe a cabin, and a singular, prestigious mandate: make sure the work gets done. You didn’t open your laptop to execute tasks or go out into the field to sell; you synthesized the work of your subordinates and presented it upwards.
The Facade of Flat Hierarchies
Fast forward to today, and the landscape is completely unrecognizable. Walk into any major Indian product tech company and you will find Vice Presidents raking in 1 to 1.5 crores a year—plus stock options and bonuses—sitting on an open floor without a cabin in sight. HR will try to sell you the romance of a “flat hierarchy” where everyone is an equal worker, but make no mistake, it is pure cost-cutting masked as accessibility.
The pure-play people manager is dead. Just a few years ago, a CEO managing billions in revenue was functionally blind to what was happening two levels below them. They relied entirely on a cascading chain of managers to condense 70-email threads and 20-slide decks into a single, digestible two-minute presentation.
The Tech Guillotine
Today, the corporate world operates entirely on recorded, digital footprints. Communication and project tracking now happen across three distinct, highly visible pillars:
- Internal Messaging Platforms: Tools like Slack or MS Teams have replaced casual desk check-ins.
- Cluttered Email Threads: Traditional emails still exist, but they are often convoluted 70-message chains where only a fraction of the CC’d audience knows what is actually going on.
- Video Conferencing: Zoom, Google Meet, and MS Teams ensure that even physical conference room meetings are recorded and archived.
The only conversations escaping this digital dragnet are the ones you have in the canteen bitching about your boss. And frankly, the CEO does not care about those. What top management cares about is their elite, admin-level access to these platforms. A CEO can pull up a dashboard in a single minute and see exactly what the marketing team is working on, who is responsible, and where the bottlenecks are. They no longer need a highly paid coordinator to play Chinese whispers.
The IC-Manager Hybrid
We are witnessing a brutal purge of corporate bloat. Small businesses and startups have always required all hands on deck to survive, but now the IT giants—companies with tens of thousands of employees—are adopting the same ruthless efficiency. You can no longer hide behind the extreme incompetence of previous generations, where senior management didn’t even know how to save a document as a PDF. With AI acting as a massive magic wand, generating a presentation takes minutes. The excuses have vanished.
The new reality is the hybrid worker: you must manage your team, play therapist to their gripes, and simultaneously deliver as an Individual Contributor (IC). At least 25 to 30 percent of a manager’s job today involves direct, hands-on contribution using their core skills. Unless you sit in the elite top 2 to 5 percent of the company’s hierarchy—where you are strictly saddled with crushing top-line targets like scaling from 50 to 100 crores in revenue—you are not exempt from the grind.
Power has brutally concentrated at the very top. Today’s middle managers are largely stripped of their former influence; many are reduced to merely approving leaves or passing along promotion recommendations that the top brass decide anyway. The muscle of managing people is still a rare, necessary skill, but if your individual contribution isn’t up to the mark, your title won’t save you. Adapt to the hybrid reality, or prepare to be obsolete.
Pol Ke Bol! 