In my experience quite a few managers are there to do cargo cult activities mostly involving power point presentations and planning for their managers. In the worst situation it seemed like the vast majority of effort and salary spend went towards satisfying the VP’s appetite for reporting when engineers were very understaffed they focused on expanding to new layers of management instead of hiring ICs.

some of this management can be useful but often a lot of it is not, at best. As organizations age companies become mostly about advancing careers of middle management and the things the company actually does become secondary.