I mostly agree with you and I think it highly depends on the organizational complexity. In a smaller company (100 people) I was able to manage 10 people and st

I mostly agree with you and I think it highly depends on the organizational complexity. In a smaller company (100 people) I was able to manage 10 people and still had time to write some non-critical code. That's because there was little overhead - just 2 PMs to work with, not many meetings. Then in a large org (5,000+) it became much harder. Even though I had only 5 reports, I had to attend plenty of cross-dept meetings, had multiple stakeholders, and in order to get anything done I had to talk to 5 different people. In order to "flatten" the organization, first this complexity must be tackled. If there's s lot of overhead to get things done, removing managers won't help, because now ICs will have to do the job that previously was done by managers