Amazon, Meta, and other tech giants are cutting middle management to be more efficient. It's a risky move that could backfire.

• Big Tech's latest cost cutting move is "flattening," or removing middle management from the org chart.
• Amazon, Meta, Salesforce and others are flattening out, even as they lay off workers.
• This is likely to work in the short term, but removing middle management has long-term consequences.

Meta, Salesforce, and Amazon have more in common beyond their recent swath of far-reaching layoffs. They're also the exemplars of a new cost-cutting trend in Silicon Valley: Removing the middle managers from their org charts, in a trend that's been called "flattening" at each company.