zlacker

It is not the layers of management that is the problem, it is the quality of management. While great engineers mind their own business and deliver great products, the people that are not great engineers manage their way into management. They are more and more incompetent and corrupt and this is killing the companies, slowly or not that slow. So it is incompetent and corrupt management, not too much management.

>>Adrian+(OP)
If they are moving into management and causing more harm than benefit, then isn't that by definition too much management? Said another way, not having that manager would make things better, all else being equal.

>>rybosw+Oo1
Management is needed. Having bad managers is bad. For example, a manager cannot have too many people without becoming a full time people manager and doing nothing else, a good manager can handle 5 other people while still contributing him/herself. That means a team of 25-30 people need another management layer, a team of 120-150 another and so on, similar with armies having teams of 4, squads of 10, platoons, companies, battalions, brigades, divisions, corps etc. So based on the size of the organization the number of layers have some optimum numbers, too much or too less is bad. But the worst is the bad quality managers - fragging is not a thing in the corporate world, there is no way to get rid of bad managers and the organizations start to rot, get worse, sometime die.