Saw 4 managers literally walking by their employees desks watching them work. To add insult to injury, there were 4 managers for 12 employees doing this.
Individual contributors, too, but those have a much harder time hiding.
An extrovert schmoozer can afford to not work that much as a manager for a long time.
Just join meetings, write some short docs, etc.
He frequently completely bombards initiatives from within the team with bad faith arguments only to present them as his personal achievements a couple of months later.
When it comes to the areas where the manager is supposed to be useful, like cross team communication, all the work is done by the devs.
An incompetent or checked-out IC is easy to spot. While comparing the relative impact of people on a team is a Hard Problem, setting that someone's just not doing anything is easy.
On the other hand, the metric of success for a manager is how well their team is performing. So if you take an incompetent (or even a complete no-op) manager and assign them to a capable team, the organization gets no signal that the manager isn't part of the formula for that team's success.
There are measures to counteract that (skip levels, for example). But in many places, skip levels are so rarely held, and/or the manager is geographically close to their manager, creating a wide delta in social comfort between the manager and the IC with the skip-level manager. That dissuades ICs from being honest about the situation.
So there's no signal to use to "manage this kind of person out," and since this is a common problem across the whole tech sector, competitors are weighed down by a similar percentage of worthless managers - so their existence doesn't threaten the company's survival.
Manager with be seen as the slur that it should in 50 years.