I've heard a lot about good managers, but never experienced one. It was always some form of manipulation, cutting the corners, forcing agenda even on solutions that were both wildly profitable as well as technically excellent "to make their mark", finding scapegoats to blame, in order to propel manager's ego and standing within company; the game was purely about power, hacking perception of their seniors about their qualities in order to progress. People that didn't play tended to find themselves packaged for layoffs, regardless of how much company benefited from them in the past.

So from my experience: Good manager is like UFO - I've heard of it, but never seen one. Unless you consider top management that just makes itself invisible and leaves kids on the playground doing whatever they are inspired to. That would be probably closest to what I could take as good management.

They exist. I've had a few. Protecting devs from meetings, being flexible, not getting their own ego into things, generally trust their developers to figure out how to code things (or at least the architects), try to keep you from working long hours (or if there are long hours, they're probably working them with you), pretty transparent about the crap that's going on above their heads (although that can be because that's all they can offer and aren't allowed to give you what you really want by the higher ups).

Invariably though, these guys were in the trenches at one point. Good developers or designers that eventually rose up into management. They understand how it's better if everyone works together instead of get too deep in politics (they aren't perfect about that, though, I've seen them have favorites) and try to enable their team as much as possible.

The types of things you're talking about like manipulation et al., I've only seen from career managers, who never really had a proper job making things. And those definitely exist, and are more plentiful than the good managers, but the good ones aren't mythical creatures. You're just getting unlucky in finding them, I guess.

This is my main problem with engineers that become managers. Programming does tend to create ego problems. You want that as your manager? Not really a good move. My best manager had no idea how to code, but he knew how to communicate, lend an ear and really listen, and make sure everyone was happy. But somehow he did it with a firm hand. Every one knew the line to not cross was mostly about lying. You have to be truthful that's what he can see through.

Apropos of this, some of my junior engineers now repeat back to me "code without ego" every time they have a code review or make a mistake. They take pride in not allowing their ego to get in the way. All it took was me demonstrating egoless working and loudly advocating that we all leave our ego at home.

I soothe my ego on the anonymous internet. In the workplace, it goes in the fucking box and every other thing I say is a variation on "I don't understand". Working life is so much easier without ego games. So much more pleasant.

I hypothesise that programmers with excessive ego have been sadly let down by managers and team leads in their formative years :(

The valley is a pretty capitalistic place and one that's willing to eschew orthodoxy.

But managers are still the norm. If it were economically preferable to not have managers, I think you'd see that model gaining lots of traction.

Maybe this is a common model though, I'm not familiar with very many truly flat organizations.