The Silent Goodbye to Titles in Software

The end of coordination, the rise of doers...

January 2026 was the worst month for job cuts in the United States since the 2009 global financial crisis. In just one month, more than 108,000 people lost their jobs. This is 118% more than the same month last year. Around the world, more than 30,000 tech workers lost their jobs in the first six weeks of the year. But these numbers don’t only show a correction after too much hiring during the pandemic. Something different is happening: companies are not cutting normal workers. They are cutting the layer that coordinates them. In October 2025, Amazon cut 14,000 jobs and most of them were middle managers. Google cut 35% of its managers who led small teams in 2025. Accenture cut 11,000 people in December 2025. CEO Julie Sweet explained the hard truth like this: “We will let go of people we cannot retrain.”

The software industry is going through a deep change that is reshaping how work gets done. The corporate world, built with many levels of hierarchy, is being replaced by a structure where speed and direct technical work matter most. Middle management is disappearing. The lines between frontend, backend, and product management roles are also disappearing. Titles are losing their meaning. What remains is one clear figure: The Doer.

The Doer Class: A New Way to Organize

Keith Rabois, a former PayPal employee and investor, says every company has a small group of people who actually get results. These are people who, when given a goal, find the resources, motivate the team, solve problems themselves, and reach the result. Rabois calls them “barrels.” They are doers who can take initiative. Everyone else, no matter how talented, is “ammunition.” They are necessary, but they cannot shoot alone.

Rabois shares striking numbers: In 2002, PayPal had 254 employees in total. Even in this legendary talent pool, there were only 12 to 17 “barrels.” Rabois explains the basic rule: The number of important things a company can do at the same time depends on the number of barrels. Adding more ammunition solves nothing. Without barrels, more ammunition only means more spending.

This is exactly where the main change of the AI age becomes clear. Producing and managing ammunition is now AI’s job. Only the barrels,the doers remain.

The Coordination Layer Becomes Useless

When AI takes over the ammunition, the layer that distributes and manages it also loses its purpose. Manager, Director, Product Manager... People with these titles were doing the same work: planning the ammunition, setting priorities, tracking, reporting, and managing communication between teams. When AI takes over all these tasks, these titles have no reason to exist.

According to Revelio Labs, which tracks more than 100 million job profiles, middle manager job posts in October 2025 were 42% below the peak of April 2022. There are no signs of recovery. So while everyone talks about new graduates and inexperienced workers, the real issue we are missing might be the middle level. A Gusto analysis of 8,500 small and medium businesses shows that the number of people one manager directly supervises grew from 3 in 2019 to 6 in 2025 — exactly double. We simply don’t need this many people for coordination anymore.

The situation of Product Managers (PMs) is the most visible part of this story. Traditional PM tasks, collecting input and writing roadmaps, are becoming useless in the AI age. If something that was impossible in November becomes easy in March, yearly planning is a silly approach. The PM’s job was always coordination, but the people who needed coordination have disappeared. For two years, Shopify has not allowed product managers to give static presentations. Everything must be a working demo. Just writing features on a slide is no longer accepted. The new job of every role PM, designer, engineer is to become a mini CEO: to know what you are building and why.

Why Are Titles Melting?

There is a deeper difference that connects all of this. In Rabois’s words: “Are you working for value preservation or value creation? Seniority and experience are useful on the value preservation side. On the value creation side, they probably are not.”

This sentence explains very simply why titles are melting. Titles and seniority are useful tools in defense. But when you are building something new, a title only slows you down. In the AI age, every company must move to the value creation side, because the things they own lose value very fast. What was impossible a year ago is possible today. At this speed, defending current products without building new ones means death for a company.

The New Source of Authority: Impact

While title-based hierarchy collapses, a new path is rising: Staff+ engineering. This means technical leadership without being a manager. These roles do not manage people; they manage systems and technical direction. A Staff engineer does not do performance reviews. They set the technical strategy of the organization, solve complex problems, and mentor other engineers when needed. They are a force multiplier. They have no hierarchy; they have an area of impact.

The new figure that appears is the generalist specialist: an engineer who goes deep in one area but also spreads across many disciplines. They write code, make product decisions, talk to customers, and coordinate their own work. Their title is not very important. What matters is their impact.

AI Excitement and the Return

Of course, this approach has risks too.

First, the cost of moving too early. Companies are firing people based on AI abilities that do not yet exist. If they hurry, the cost of replacing those workers later can be much bigger.

Second, human nature itself. In flat organizations without an official structure, informal and hidden hierarchies always form. If titles are removed, decisions go to the loudest voice, not the most skilled person. But since fewer people are involved here, I think this risk will not be very big.

The Authority of Code

Companies now get their ammunition from AI. They are removing the layer that managed ammunition. Only the doers remain. There are also weak signs that this picture will return to how it was before. Even if a return happens, what comes back will not be the old organization chart. It will be new and cheaper ammunition (outsource or junior workers). The coordination layer was swallowed by AI and will not come back. Because the work that layer did, writing reports, passing information between people, managing approval traffic is exactly what machines do best.

This new order also requires a personal stance. The people who will have the advantage in the future are those who do not wait when they see something new. They start building right away. Those who wait and prepare will see that the thing they wanted to build is already finished when their preparation ends.

In conclusion, leadership is not a title; it is a behavior. The highest step you can reach will not be written on your business card. What you build will speak for it.