When I worked at efficient tech companies, I had a hard time understanding these articles. If anything, it felt like we had too few managers to handle typical m

When I worked at efficient tech companies, I had a hard time understanding these articles. If anything, it felt like we had too few managers to handle typical management things and the engineers were often losing time to dealing with things that could have been more efficiently handled by a responsible manager. Then I took a job at a management-heavy company. They had people with different manager titles for absolutely everything. I ended up on a small group where we somehow ended up with more managers than engineers. Some of the excess managers used the situation to do very little. They'd join a couple meetings, maybe respond to a couple e-mails, then basically disappear. Others started inventing work to fill the time. It wasn't uncommon for us to be scheduled for 4-5 hours of meetings in a single day because different managers felt like they needed to make themselves visible and point to things on the calendar to show that they were working. The weirdest part was how everyone sort of acknowledged that the situation wasn't good, but refused to do anything about it. When I tried to push back on some of the meetings, our CTO recommended that our team should join the meetings but continue to code during the meetings. It turned into this weird circus where we were spending most of our days in virtual meetings, trying to do work while managers would pepper us with questions. When we had layoffs, they laid off mostly engineers. The ratio of managers to engineers went up. More meetings ensued. When the CEO got angry that engineering wasn't producing enough, management's first reaction was to request more headcount for more managers. They insisted that with more managers they could more effectively manage the engineers. So they hired more managers, who scheduled more meetings... The lesson I learned was that once a company becomes infected with managerial excess, your situation is only going to get worse. Get out and move to a company that understands how to operate and how to manage their managers.