Apart from pushing someone out who they don’t wanna pay severance for, what incentive does a manager have to treat one of their reports like dirt?
He has no leadership abilities, doesn't understand the tech, can't mentor us, can't pathfind for us and every vendor we deal with he has managed to upset.
To make up for all these shortcomings, he is manipulative and two faced, micro-managing to an extreme degree and generally when he does find something he half understands he's all over it (and you) to a degree that reduces your productivity to nothing.
Control is the aim. Everything is out of control, so the one thing he does have (seniority, the ear of upper management) he uses wilfully.
At one point this guy got an alert on one of the monitoring services, so he panicked and called customers, dragged in senior management and only after that started sending texts that I urgently had to look at it even though I had already dismissed the error as a minor fault in the monitor itself. I made the mistake of telling him to fuck off after the 6th text message in 2 minutes.
I, of course, got a formal warning from HR. He bumbles on regardless.
After I did get laid off, he either blocked me very effectively, or exercised his EU right to be forgotten, because I can't find a public record of him. Although it would be funny to start shitposting his name around out of spite, since those would be the only records that show up.
There’s other reasons sometimes. Control maybe. Maybe they have damage themselves and don’t realize what they are doing. But the big one I’d say is the desire to control the product release timeline.
Btw we all keep saying managers, but I’ve seen structures where the lead engineer is in this position of having personell controls along with technical control and it can be, and in my experience was, even worse.