(Note: my replies below assume a sane situation at a FANG company with good management.) #define MM middle manager > But they are never in any meetings Do yo

(Note: my replies below assume a sane situation at a FANG company with good management.) #define MM middle manager > But they are never in any meetings Do you mean they are never in any meetings that you are in, or do you mean that you have access to their calendars and can see that they have no meetings at all? I have never seen a MM who's calendar isn't back-to-back meetings all day every day. Their job is basically 100% talking to people, whether that's face-to-face or via email or whatever. Note that depending on how senior they are, their calendar may be made private, since the names of their meetings and who they're meeting with might be sensitive ("Sync about possible layoffs" would be a really bad meeting name to leak). A large number of these meetings are (1) people trying to influence the MM (i.e. get them to approve something) and (2) the MM trying to influence other people (i.e. get a partner team to do something, or get their boss to approve something). > And they don't seem to affect the direction of projects in any way The fact that your team exists and is staffed by N people was an MM's decision at some point. It may have been someone else who had the idea to create your team, but they had to make their case to an MM and convince them that it was worth staffing. Has your team ever grown, i.e. gotten a slot for one more person? If so, an MM made the final decision that it was worth allocating another person. MMs spend as much time managing "up" as "down". An MM's boss is asking them to justify why the company has 100 people working on X. To do this, the MM has to demonstrate that there is an important business problem to sole, and present a convincing strategy to solve it that requires 100 people to execute. If your basic experience on the team doesn't seem to be directly influenced by MMs on a regular basis, that may just indicate that you're in a stable part of the org solving a clear business problem and the MM is satisfied that you are executing. You would see an MM's influence by (big) changes in team priorities, project direction, reorgs of your team, etc.