Yep, it was a way of getting more managers to the same number of engineers. Granted it was only 1 org so maybe they were just bad, but I had one line manager and one (Or sometimes multiple) project managers. The project managers compete for engineer time, which is supposed to be managed by the line manager allocating you to different projects. In reality nobody wants to say no and it was very easy for project managers to lowball project estimates thereby squeezing people in on 2 or sometimes even 3 projects at the same time.

"How you manage your time was up to you but the spreadsheet says these 3 projects will fill 40 hours a week, if it actually takes 100 hours maybe you're bad at time management" was a pretty common attitude from managers. I didn't stay long and neither did anyone else who had even the slightest talent.

The company was a major telco in a European country, so not a small startup with growth pains but a proper enterprise org with several thousands employees.