I think there is another powerful force that explains why so many managers are perceived as bad: in most companies, career growth for managers means moving up,

I think there is another powerful force that explains why so many managers are perceived as bad: in most companies, career growth for managers means moving up, and moving up is at best uncorrelated with managing your team well and with respect. I would actually go as far as it is negatively correlated in some cases. A lot of stuff I see about what an EM should do, on places like leaddev, in the well known eng. management books, those are all great. They cover most of what I enjoy doing as an engineering manager. But they also means shit for moving up in many (most ?) larger orgs. Part of the issue is that as the company grows in size, it becomes essentially impossible to correlate company success with certain teams. The complexity becomes such as people above you cannot possibly understand properly what's happening there. At this point, it starts to become all about managing up and lateraly, which takes an awful lot of time. People above you even has less mental space than you on what's happening in your org. So one trick that many senior managers will us, in engineering and otherwise, is to be behind some big salient initiatives. It is kind of a marketing trick. Do something visible that be associated to you. And then unfortunately the trick often becomes to leave before people can understand the mess that creates. But I think it is important to understand the incentive behind that: it is not because people are evil or stupid. It is just inherent to most large organizations. Very very few large orgs has been able to prevent this behavior.