Meta's Opt-In Offer Invites Some Applied AI Staff Back Into Manager Roles

Meta is partly walking back the management cuts it became known for. Fast Company reports that the company has been asking some individual contributors in its Applied AI division whether they would like to return to managerial roles, which Quartz calls a partial reversal of a broader push toward flatter organizational structures. At Metaintro we track these org chart swings because they decide who gets promoted, who gets stuck, and which titles are worth holding out for. If your manager title disappeared in a flattening, this shows the pendulum can swing back.

What happened

Fast Company reports, citing Business Insider and four people with knowledge of the matter, that Meta has approached some individual contributors in its Applied AI division about moving back into supervisory roles. Meta declined a request for comment.

The division itself is new. Meta formed Applied AI in March to support its superintelligence efforts, and said at the time that the division's teams would run a flat structure with up to 50 individual contributors for each manager. Some of the individual contributors inside that 7,000-person unit had previously been in management. Those are the people now being asked to come back.

Nobody is being forced. Quartz reports that four people with knowledge of the matter described the program as opt-in, targeting individual contributors in a unit that absorbed roughly 7,000 employees earlier this year. Quartz adds, citing Business Insider, that some of those employees had previously held management positions before being reassigned to individual contributor roles within the unit. An opt-in offer is a company asking rather than reassigning, and that difference matters for anyone deciding whether to say yes.

Fifty reports per manager is an extreme ceiling. Gallup puts the median U.S. team at about five to six employees per manager or leader, so Meta's stated ceiling is roughly eight to ten times the size of a typical team. Fortune reads the latest shift as a reminder that while AI may strip out layers of bureaucracy, building and deploying advanced AI systems at scale still requires human leadership, coordination, and oversight.

The context is what makes this notable. Meta is closely associated with the corporate move to reduce bureaucracy, known colloquially as the Great Flattening. Claiming that flatter is faster, it aggressively eliminated management layers during its Year of Efficiency in 2023, and managers were also targeted as part of its 10% workforce cuts earlier this year, according to an analysis by Business Insider.

The size of those cuts is on the record. Fortune reports that Meta cut about 10% of its workforce, roughly 8,000 employees, and scrapped plans to fill 6,000 open positions, and that the layoffs disproportionately affected managers and were intended to simplify reporting structures. Quartz reports that Meta Chief People Officer Janelle Gale said in a memo at the time that the company was reducing managerial layers and moving toward a structure where teams can move faster and with more ownership.

Meta's own filing confirms the scale. The company's second quarter 2026 results put headcount at 75,472 at the end of the second quarter, a decrease of 1% year-over-year, and note that the figure still includes approximately 8,000 employees impacted by the May 2026 headcount reduction. The same release lists $1.18 billion of severance expenses in connection with the May 2026 headcount reduction, within total costs and expenses of $42.03 billion, an increase of 55% year-over-year.

Fortune places the move in a longer arc, reporting that in 2023, during what Zuckerberg branded his year of efficiency, the company asked many managers and directors to move into individual contributor jobs or leave, in a process it internally called flattening. Fortune calls that 2023 flattening the same maneuver Meta is now selectively undoing, and notes that Meta did not immediately respond to its request for comment.

This is also not the first personnel reversal inside Applied AI. Meta previously allowed some employees added to the division to leave, after complaints that they had been drafted in against their wishes. Fortune adds that Wired reported employee frustration over the rollout of the division, and some workers reassigned to the group were later given the option to pursue other opportunities within the company. Fortune also reports that in July, 26 Meta employees sued the company, alleging it had used internal AI systems and activity-monitoring data to disproportionately target workers on medical, parental, or family leave in the May cuts. A division that has now adjusted its staffing twice since March is telling you something useful about how settled its structure really is.

There is a wider signal here for anyone building a career around AI work. Applied AI is the division Meta formed to support its superintelligence efforts, and it launched with the flattest structure the company described. If that structure is already being adjusted, it is worth weighing before you accept a role on the promise that a team is being run a radically better way. How Meta's AI reorg has played out for career growth is useful background before you take that kind of offer. New divisions are where structural experiments happen, and experiments are revised.

Where the coverage agrees, and where it splits

The agreement is on direction. The Meta coverage, the Uber coverage and the Gallup research all describe fewer managers and bigger teams. Gallup puts the average number of people reporting to managers at 12.1 in 2025, up from 10.9 in 2024, and calls that a nearly 50% increase in team size since it first measured in 2013. Gallup also cites figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showing roughly one manager for every 11.5 employees.

The split is between the average and the median, and it changes the story completely. Gallup attributes the rise largely to a two-percentage-point increase in teams of 25 or more employees, while the median team size has held steady at about five to six employees per manager. In Gallup's own words, a minority of very large teams is pulling the average up, while most managers still lead relatively small teams.

The median team size has held steady at about five to six employees per manager or leader, even as the average climbed, according to Gallup's span of control research.

The distribution makes the point sharper. Gallup finds that 37% of managers or leaders oversee fewer than five people, while roughly two-thirds (66%) manage fewer than 10. About one in five managers (22%) have 10 to 24 direct reports, and only 13% oversee 25 or more employees.

That distinction is the most useful thing in this story for an individual. The Great Flattening is not a uniform condition of working life that you simply have to accept. It is concentrated in a subset of very large teams, which means the difference between a manageable job and an impossible one can be the specific team you sit on rather than the era you happen to work in. That is a variable you can interrogate in an interview.

The cost of those large teams shows up in Gallup's manager data. Gallup reports that compared with a few years ago, more managers report burnout, stress, job-seeking behavior and lower engagement. It warns that when organizations widen spans of control without reducing managers' individual workloads, they risk weakening day-to-day performance management by compromising their managers' own performance.

There is a smaller split on the unit itself. Fast Company describes Applied AI as a 7,000-person unit, where Fortune frames the same number as roughly 7,000 employees reassigned to the unit earlier this year, including some who had previously held manager positions. The distinction is worth holding onto, because a division built by moving existing employees into it is a different thing from one staffed by hiring, and Fortune's framing is why some of its individual contributors have management experience to be asked back into.

The other split is between companies still flattening and companies quietly unwinding it. While Meta asks some managers to return, Uber is moving the other way. TechCrunch reports Uber is laying off about 3,300 people, or about 10% of its global headcount, in a restructuring that would shrink the number of managers by 20%, with some of those people working as individual contributors going forward. The company is also reducing the number of teams with one or two members by 50% and letting go staff more than seven layers down from the CEO, according to reporting first published by Bloomberg. We looked at what the Uber cuts mean for middle managers when the news broke.

The framing difference between outlets is small but real. HR Executive describes Uber as having cut the number of employees who are seven or more layers removed from the CEO by 20% and having nearly halved the number of managers overseeing micro-teams of only one or two people, where TechCrunch attaches the 20% figure to managers overall. Quartz puts the two companies side by side, noting that Uber recently moved to eliminate half of its micro-teams in connection with layoffs of its own.

Uber chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi wrote that the outcome is a simpler org chart geared toward building versus managing, according to HR Executive.

HR Executive also notes this is Uber's third disclosed round of job cuts this year, following a June reduction of 23% of its People and Places organization, which includes HR, recruiting and workplace functions.

Read those two companies together and the lesson is not that flattening is over. It is that the structure your employer announces is a bet, and bets get unwound. Anyone treating a current org chart as a permanent fact about their career is reading it wrong.

What this means for your job search

Treat a returning manager title as a negotiation, not a favour. The fact that it is an opt-in offer rather than a reassignment is the whole point. If you were flattened out of a supervisory role and are now being asked back, you are being asked for something rather than told, and that is a better place to negotiate from. It also helps to read why some high performers decline their next promotion before you decide. The same forces that are reshaping what middle managers actually do are what created the vacancy you are being offered.

Ask what the span of control will actually be before you say yes. A team of five or six is the median that most managers still lead, and Gallup finds only 13% of managers oversee 25 or more employees. Those are different jobs with the same title, and the number is the single most useful question you can ask in the conversation. If nobody will give you a straight answer, that is an answer. Checking your own readiness for a manager role belongs in the same conversation.

Then ask who else was offered the role. If the company is filling several posts at once, the difference between being first choice and being the third person asked tells you how much room you have to negotiate level and band. It is a fair question, asked plainly, and the response is informative whether or not you get a number. Thinking twice before accepting a promotion applies just as much when the promotion is a title you used to hold.

Get the scope in writing, because titles move faster than compensation does. A company that reversed its structure once can reverse it again, and the thing that survives a reorg is what is documented in your level, your band and your written scope. The case against cutting middle managers gives you language to make this argument out loud rather than treating it as a personal request.

If you are an individual contributor with no interest in managing, this is equally useful information. If you are absorbing coordination, onboarding and review work without the title, the moment a company starts asking people back into management is the moment to ask for either the title or the scope back. If you want to grow without managing, ask whether the company offers a dual career path for senior individual contributors. Understanding how the megamanager pattern developed makes that conversation much easier to open, and so does knowing how AI is reshaping middle management roles.

For anyone job hunting into one of these companies, the org chart is now a legitimate interview topic. Ask how many people the role supports, how many layers sit between it and the executive who owns the budget, and whether the team has been restructured in the past year. Uber letting go of staff more than seven layers down from the CEO is a reminder that depth in an org chart can itself be a risk factor.

My own read is that the flattening story left out who does the work a removed layer used to do. Gallup's warning that wider spans without lighter workloads risk weakening day-to-day performance management is the part the Great Flattening headlines skipped. Meta asking some former managers back is one company acting on that risk inside one division, not proof that flattening is finished.

The practical stance is to stay flexible about titles and rigid about scope. Titles are the part of your job most exposed to whichever management theory your employer believes this year, and scope, documented and agreed, is the part that survives. The same logic runs through the case for empowering managers during AI adoption. Recognising when a manager is the real gap in your development is worth doing before you accept a role in a structure that has just been rewritten.

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People Also Asked

Q: Is Meta actually bringing back middle managers?

A: Fast Company reports that Meta has been asking some individual contributors in its Applied AI division whether they would like to return to managerial roles, citing Business Insider and four people with knowledge of the matter. Quartz reports the program is opt-in. Meta declined a request for comment. The division was set up in March with a flat structure of up to 50 individual contributors per manager.

Q: How many people does the average manager supervise now?

A: Gallup puts the average at 12.1 in 2025, up from 10.9 in 2024, and describes that as a nearly 50% rise since it first measured in 2013. The median has held steady at about five to six people, so a minority of very large teams is pulling the average upward rather than every manager taking on more.

Q: Should I take a manager role back if my company offers it?

A: Ask what the span of control will be before you decide, because a team of five and a team of twenty five carry the same title and are different jobs. Get the level, band and written scope agreed rather than relying on the title, since a company that has reversed its structure once can reverse it again.

Get the inside scoop on how employers really structure their teams before you take the job, not after. Metaintro tracks how companies reorganise, who they promote and where the management layers are being rebuilt, so you can read an org chart before you sign a contract. Create a free profile and start mapping your next move today.