FWIW, my direct manager was indeed "transparent", as in, he wasn't managing us textbook-properly, but he definitely shielded us from upper management BS, while

FWIW, my direct manager was indeed "transparent", as in, he wasn't managing us textbook-properly, but he definitely shielded us from upper management BS, while helping us out to achieve our goals and enable our engineering work. I usually try to avoid assessing management as "bad" (it's just a downward spiral, everyone just says it, and trigger each other), but in this particular case it was so exceptionally bad that we all went into long discussions and analysis of it.