In the technological world, things move at a dizzying speed, and sometimes the lack of tact of great leaders leaves us with headlines that are pure gold to analyze.
If you work in marketing, development, or team management, you’ve surely noticed the strained atmosphere of recent months. But what happened a few days ago was the last straw.
On March 17, 2026, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, posted a message on X (Twitter) that lit the fuse of outrage. The (translated) text read like this: “I feel a lot of gratitude for the people who wrote extremely complex software character by character. It’s hard to remember how much effort it actually took. Thank you for bringing us to this point.”
What from the top of Silicon Valley was probably thought of as a nice tribute (a “sweet feeling,” as TechCrunch described it), from the trenches was received as a slap in the face.
The reason? Altman sounded like he was saying goodbye to a relic of the past, welcoming a “historic” effort just as his own company’s AI tools are being used to justify mass layoffs.
The irony of the code and the explosion of memes
The developer community’s annoyance was more than justified. The AI tools that today write code at lightning speed were trained, ironically, on millions of handwritten lines by those same humans Altman thanked.
The responses to the tweet were immediate and the networks were filled with anger, sarcasm and memes. The message was interpreted as a “disguised dismissal letter” or a funeral prayer.
Some users responded with a crude: “Thank you for making us redundant.” Others used dark humor: “This reads like something the Mayans would say just before the ceremony begins.”
The general consensus was to dismiss the message as disconnected from reality, accusing managers of stealing jobs after having benefited from the human code to get here.
And we are not talking about an unfounded fear. The data are chilling. Between 2024 and 2025, the sector accumulated more than 276,000 layoffs. In the United States alone, almost 55,000 of those cuts are directly attributed to the implementation of Artificial Intelligence.
And 2026 is not looking better: Amazon has cut 16,000 jobs, the Block company has fired almost half of its workforce (about 4,000 people), Atlassian has laid off 10% and Meta is evaluating cutting up to 20%. The fear of losing a job due to AI has jumped from 28% to 40% globally.
The real target of AI: Your boss
Everyone is talking about how tools like GitHub Copilot, Devin or Claude Code are decimating the offerings for junior and mid-level programmers. Altman promised years ago that AI would make coders “10 times more productive” and that it would not replace them.
However, the sad reality is that many companies are using AI as the perfect excuse to cut heads and save costs.
But here comes the twist of the script and the most fascinating (and silenced) point of this story. There is a group that is suffering the impact of AI even more aggressively than the hacks: middle management.
If you thought that by having a management position you were safe from algorithms, hold on to your chair. The consulting firm Gartner has released a devastating prediction: 20% of organizations will use AI to eliminate more than half of their middle management positions before the end of 2026.
Why are they going after managers? The answer is painfully simple. For decades, many middle managers have acted, in practice, as “information carriers.”
His day-to-day consisted of collecting data from his teams, packaging it into reports or PowerPoints, and uploading it up the chain of command. Today, Artificial Intelligence does that job infinitely better, in real time and without asking for days off.
The “flattening” of companies
What we are experiencing is what large consulting firms like McKinsey call organizational “flattening.” AI dramatically reduces the need for that traditional middle supervision, and tech giants have already taken note.
Look at the recent movements:
- Google eliminated an entire layer of managers in its GCS division at a stroke.
- Microsoft is changing its structure to go from having one boss for every 5.5 engineers to one boss for every 10.
- Intel has flattened no less than 8 hierarchical levels at once.
We are facing a phenomenon of “jobless growth” that generates widespread anxiety in the sector. 2026 is the year in which companies have stopped “playing” with AI in the testing phase to use it strategically as payroll pruning shears.
Evolve or be the next “Thank You”
So, are we all condemned to unemployment? No, but we are condemned to change.
The sector is heading towards a hybrid reality. Gartner predicts that by 2030, 80% of companies will change their huge engineering departments for very small but “AI-augmented” teams.
There will be fewer manual coders, but new roles will emerge focused on getting the most out of the machine. For managers, the message is just as clear. The leaders who will survive this sifting are those who abandon routine reporting.
The value of the manager of the future (and of the present) lies in what the machine cannot replicate: purely human leadership, the resolution of complex corporate problems, empathy, compliance and the ability to help their teams recycle (upskilling).
Sam Altman’s controversial tweet has been the perfect catalyst to make visible a tension that was cut with a knife. AI does not eliminate talent; What it eliminates is the need to do things as we did until 2023.
The clock is already ticking. It’s time to let go of Excel, stop being a simple transmitter of data and start providing real strategic value. Because if we do not adapt quickly, we run the risk of becoming the protagonists of the next “thank you for your services” from the CEO on duty.
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