But I've given up on ever getting a decent raise from a company. I've been prepared to switch companies every two years.
The Gervais Principle is a great lens with which to look at company hierarchies and all people in any large organization should know about it: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
"Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves."(Don't get too attached to the names used, Rao intentionally makes everyone into a miserable cog in the machine)
[1] http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub913e_web.pd...
You are 100% correct on this. In many, if not most companies, though definitely not all or everywhere, line managers have limited freedom as to what they can decide to do with their teams in terms of people, process, and technology without having to "get permission" or have the blessing of more senior leaders. Certainly hiring new people to the team, the line manager will have nearly full control over a yes or no, barring some extenuating circumstance. Although with firing a team member, it is quite the process, not just because of the corporate HR and legal red tape but also because frequently senior leaders will be interested in or meddle in the the decision and process of letting a team member go.
Finally, as you said about the messenger role, it is very common for senior leaders to have their weekly or monthly or bi-weekly or whatever meeting with their managers where they cover issues of policy or process and certain decisions will get made there and then need to be funneled down to individual teams. It is here where line managers, even if they don't agree, may be forced to deliver a chance (and the associated announcement of said change) to the team and there is little, if anything, they can do about it.
On the other hand, there are strong line managers and weak line managers. Strong line managers will be move actively involved in cross-cutting team concerns, particularly those that may affect their own team. And as such, they may be influencers themselves, in which case they do have a lot more sway because in many cases, they will have been the proponent or even instigator of a change that does get rolled across and out to multiple teams. Weak line managers, on the other hand, may suffer from lack of experience, poor peer relationships, or some other factors that leave them in the lurch and that means their role is much more marginalized in the context of the wider organization.
I am not sure what can be done about incompetent people being promoted to position of power where they make horrendous misinformed decisions. Often its too late before the magnitude of their fuckups is visible, usually these people move on to different orgs with their pumped up resumes while lower level people scramble to undo the damage.
There's a director-level IT manager where I work which has made my personal job a hassle for years.
There's a follow-on business process to our main process, which was a terrible mess. I wrote a program in a year and a half which vastly simplified the process. The director is mad, because his team of 10 contractors has been unable to write a successful version for 4 years now. (Hundreds of people use my software every day. There are still no production programs using his.) I even told his team's manager how to fix what's broken about their program, and they wouldn't listen. (And then the director fired that manager.)
He wants to own the process because it's important. He needs it to line his nest. So he finally got moves made to put a sympathetic middle manager in place to force me (and my direct boss) to hand over the program to his team to maintain. As they say, if you can't code it, take it over and act like you wrote it. (And charge internal groups $1000/user/year for the privilege of using it.)
Now my job involves improving another follow-on process that's also horribly broken, even worse than the first. And I just found out at lunch today that the director MADE HIS BONES, fifteen years ago, by IMPLEMENTING the horrible process that makes all these other follow-on processes both necessary and nightmarish.
<Queue the Obama WTF GIF>
So my new quote is: "Never attribute to incompetence what can be explained as ruthlessness driven by an inferiority complex."
I'm tired now, so I won't go into how I saw this behavior distort correct outcomes and delay business improvement for personal gain, a long time ago, at another Fortune 250.
It did teach me a lot of lessons though. Never work for the company, always work for yourself. Accumulate power to make decisions, thinking that writing some kickass code is going get you somewhere is misguided.
A lot of the time this is because of the Peter Principle.[1] There are ways to combat it, though. A friend a Google explained to me that to get around this there, before being promoted you have to take on the responsibilities of the position you are looking to advance to for a few (or six?) months. Once you've proven that you can do the job passably well, they'll consider you for the promotion.
The idea is that you prevent advancing someone from an engineering role to a managerial role only to find you've lost a good engineer and gained a crappy manager, which is a double blow (ignoring for this example that engineering and managerial tracks are separate at Google AFAIK, and managers actually get paid a bit less at the same level).
I can imagine some downsides right now, such as employee burnout (since there's going to be some extra responsibilities as you attempt to do your old job and a new one at the same time), and the fact that this time perior, while somewhat long, may still not be nearly long enough to accurately gauge how a person will react in many common scenarios in the new position.
Eventually it will go to your head and you'll be viewed as a brash, arrogant, out-of-touch upper manager who throws their weight and ego around without appreciation for the repercussions of their horrendous misinformed decisions.
You either die a hero or live to see yourself become the problem.
I once had a manager who had a bunch of people leaving. They were not leaving him, the manager; they were leaving the situation the division was in that put the engineers in difficult working conditions. But the manager had HR interview several of his people, to see if he, the manager, was the problem. He said, "I had to know." (Of course, if he's that honest and that willing to look, you have a pretty good idea that he's not the problem, even before HR comes back with the results.)
I'm not here to dispute the figures that were shared in the article, I'm suggesting that the interpretation of those figures was off, as it overlooks the aspects of management that are out of the control of the line/middle manager.
Furthermore, I'm not disputing your own reasons for leaving, as I'm not suggesting the competency of line managers can't be the reason people leave their job.
If I think back on the jobs I've had in the past, it's very rare for me to have issues with line managers. However, I had serious doubts about the competency of upper management in multiple companies that I've worked for.
In this case, unless upper management recognise the problems that the line manager is highlighting, there's often not much more the line manager can do. Seeing as upper are (in my experience) frequently out of touch with the repercussions of their decisions, line managers should accept that they can only do what they can with what they're given (either that or leave).