Ineffective managers are at every level, including the C-suite. Middle managers just have a higher probability of being ineffective due to lack of experience/resources, so they get the headline.
Actually, I think it's because they're more difficult to discover; Determining whether a middle manager's performance is good or not is a far less trivial task than determining whether a technical employee is producing value.
Middle managers are adequate by default. Individual contributors are not. If a middle manager does not obviously cause damage or liability, they are generally assumed to be "working". If they do not appear to be exceptional or effective, it's assumed that their role has not presented any chances to excel. They are protected partially by the empathy that other managers have for their position. Managers are rarely fired simply for not producing results, which is very much not the case for individual contributors.
The difficulty of weeding out ineffective middle managers means they will be present as a higher percentage of total manager head count than e.g. ineffective line managers.
Successive teams I have managed liked it that their manager is "one of them". We dont have boring team meetings. All are technical except select 1-1s which are career conversations
In my opinion, any model that predicts any sort of outcome when doing so accurately is overfitted and lacks the proper contextual knowledge necessary. Should the work of actuarial science be validated as just a series of lists to prove the risk and likely hood of death? Should we all have numbers above our heads dependent on the fate and caste we are born into? These are all things these models ignore and misrepresent. If I was born into a lower middle class black family if no one knew who I was would they care about me? My struggles, my pain? So far all that I've seen are people who would rather choose to mock me. Wearing my clothing, pretending to sing my songs, my struggles. Yet nothing changes, no one cares about me, it's not my problem they say. What my ancestors did is not my fault nor my problem. While some in the scientific community care about these issues, the majority just ignores it. Even today all they care about is what book they need to read in order to follow their identity politics over real system change. Having been forced to live a lie, I can't see how or why others would care without having people who have seen and experienced it themselves. When you exclude more than half the world it really does make you wonder if we are right more than we are wrong.
For me, models that do not make predictions are not very useful. Without predictions about the future, it's very hard to tell if the work is useful moving forward, or if it should be read as a historical analysis that doesn't matter in the current environment.
Predictions are critical, they are a primary mechanism to find out if something is useful.
For R&D departments and startups, plan economies can still work because the complexity is still small enough that humans can comprehend it.
This is similar to federalism -- central governments don't work very well for everything, but scaler local governments are still effective for local issues.
Pour one out to anyone who has ever done a sprint retrospective, or a company 360 review, where all the important problems get skipped over because 'there's nothing we can do about this, this, and that.'
Line workers and managers are given an incredibly narrow window in which they are permitted to operate. Anything beyond that needs beurocratic approval. Much like in the Soviet Union, sometimes that beurocracy is staffed by intelligent human beings, but usually it is staffed by donkeys. People who care enough about doing their work find ways to work around the latter, or just give up and punch in their 9-5.
Hypothetically, A firm like Tesla or SpaceX maybe be so successful in engineer feedback because they are high demand places to work and they have not exhausted the pool of individuals who can provide great work. However as the company needs to scale, or as the company becomes less glamourous you have people who either (1) just aren't as capable or (2) don't care to expend any creativity on solving the needs of the company (either because there's no reward or they are interested in other areas).
Furthermore, a company that is not centrally planned will most likely move slower than a centrally planned one. Just like how China is able to forcibly take your land to build railways; an action like that in a free society has many gatekeepers that would slow down such a process. Any public company, that is measured on a quartely basis would find themselves grappling with showing change to wall street.
It seems more productive to focus on making sure the difference between the top and bottom doesn't get too extreme, rather than lamenting the fact of nature and wishing there was no such thing as competition.
Getting the relative most out of the bottom line workers and finding and taking care of the underperformers is the direct responsibility of their managers, and I'm saying this unironically. Managing is about being a performance multiplier, and the most hands-on part of management always involves concrete teams of people doing concrete dirty work.
It's the manager managers that are the problem mentioned here.
The incentive structure is that those workers capture much less than the value of their total output. If they worked harder so the firm required less employees, how do they benefit?
Middle managers are a totally different beast altogether and are supposed to be coordinating resources for strategic rather than tactical goals. It's a lot easier to coast in this position, however, as many competent frontline managers often have the same skill set.
But also sounds like you've never worked for good managers. They may not do actual work (but many do!), but they definitely know about the technology. They ensure blockers are removed, questions are answered, obstacles are overcome, and that motivation remains high.
They may or may not be rarer that bad managers, but they do exist!
I used to think that, but it just means you haven't worked with a good manager. Which isn't surprising since they are rare. But they exist.
A good manager will keep all roadblocks and distractions out of your way so you can be in the zone most of the time and they will play the corporate politics on your behalf so you get interesting projects and promotions.
A most dramatic demonstration of this happened at one company where I had my best manager ever succeeded by my worst manager ever. The worst wasn't a bad person or anything, just incompetent as a manager.
Under the great manager I was convinced this was the best-run company ever. Never any emergencies, never unreasonable requests, could focus all my time on interesting projects in different parts of the company. It was so great.
Then the great manager left for greener pastures and the incompetent one was hired. None of the upper management changed so the company was running the same as before. Suddenly I was inundated with nonsense escalations every day, constantly being pushed to stop working on the interesting projects, unreasonable time demands, etc. None of this was orignating from the incompetent manager directly, it came from the SVPs above.
So turns out the awesome manager was just absorbing all this noise and keeping those in his team shielded away from it so we could happily focus on tech work. The incompetent manager just forwarded everything that came to him.
Less than 6 months after the manager switch, I also left the company.
If engineers build things with no business value, then that company will fail. When every engineer is building their own passion project, then the company fail.
The position is a leadership role, one that should ideally ensure the team is united on one goal and is able to exert pressure outside the team in defense of that goal. However with any leadership role, the best people for that role aren't always the people who seek the role.
Technology has made it possible to be a more effective manager and leader.
How so?
I've built a few different organizations now and each time I've found that I need to introduce a middle management layer somewhere around 18 and 24 engineers.
The limit is always things that are really hard to automate or replace with technology like 1 on 1s, keeping a pulse on how the team is feeling, coaching people on career growth, etc.
Phones, cellphones, email, etc have all made management communication more effective. Address book in your iPhone is faster than your secretary, a Rolodex and the switchboard.
Automate the easy stuff, and have the management do the human leadership tasks.
I’d ask the engineers what else can be done differently but maybe you have implemented lean leadership already.
To be more precise, it's doable but demand years of experience, our society except for very few jobs lack such experience and as always anyone want young people with decade of experience behind...
Either way, my experience has been 5-10 directs as the sweet spot. 12-15 is fine but really pushing things. Beyond that, you need more structure.
That's just one example.