If it's any consolation, this is also a mystery to non developers like me. And developers likewise wonder why a business needs so many managers and what they do all day.
That includes representing department in stupid meetings, instead of wasting developers/engineers time.
But instead it was probably for Messenger's portion of telemetry and marketing and ads and hacking out of your phones security model to spy on you. [0]
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/protect-yourself-metas...
I wondered, too, until I spent some time as a manager.
I thought I’d have all this time to mentor juniors and updated documentation and maybe even code still.
Nope! Too much communication, negotiation, and dealing with drama. What the team sees is a nicely distilled and cleaned up version of a lot of meetings and conversations. Looks minimal but it’s the final product of all the work, not a sum of the inputs.
I was also disappointed by how much of my time went to dealing with a very small number of problem makers. I expected a bunch of management politics but 80% of the junk I had to deal with came from a small number of problem ICs, mostly on teams we worked with.