Whenever I see the parent of a grade-school athlete cursing at an umpire or encouraging the child to play very aggressively, I always make a mental note that in a couple decades society will have another terrible middle manager in its midst.

Even worse for these paper pushers of tomorrow, the working world will probably not need them–it doesn’t even really need them now. In a Wall Street Journal piece, Christopher Mims writes of startups replacing the middle-management level with data, allowing the numbers to make decisions humans used to make. The practice disappears some costs–and jobs. The opening:

Something potentially momentous is happening inside startups, and it’s a practice that many of their established competitors may be forced to copy if they wish to survive. Firms are keeping head counts low, and even eliminating management positions, by replacing them with something you wouldn’t immediately think of as a drop-in substitute for leaders and decision-makers: data.

“Every time people come to me and ask for new bodies it turns out so much of that can be answered by asking the right questions of our data and getting that in front of the decision-makers,” says James Reinhart, CEO of online secondhand clothing store thredUP. “I think frankly it’s eliminated four to five people who would [otherwise] pull data and crunch it,” he adds. …

The result isn’t really “big data,” just more data, more readily available, says Mr. Bien. The only “algorithm” processing the data and using it to make predictions is simply the humans scanning it for correlations. And now that every employee can have the tools to monitor progress toward any goal, the old role of middle managers as people who gather information and make decisions doesn’t fit into many startups. Nor do the leaders who remain need to poll middle managers to find out how employees are doing, since transparency and accountability are the essence of the data-driven company.

It isn’t the end of middle management, but it is an evolution.•