- reduce Peter Principle and pyramid org-chart building
- retain, train, and invest in good managers as a profession, not a will to power
- hire more administrative and secretarial people to navigate the minutia to unblock highly-paid employees from finding answers in the bureaucracy and doing unnecessarily-dumb paperwork
What happens though when the business puts these types of middle managers in the impossible position of not being able to say “no, this isn’t a priority right now” but still expected to maintain the same amounts of engineering productivity and feature throughput?
I didn’t write this article, but it sums up my headspace, currently: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stop-doing-more-less-2019-mat...
Staying in exactly the same place won’t affect revenue, customers or performance reviews at all. It’s when people work under the mistaken assumption that they have to increase at all costs that you have a problem.
That's just plain bad planning on a business side of the company. They should either fix that, or face gradual departure of their workforce, from best to mediocre.
I will also add though that I think there is another dimension as well. I think much perceived middle manager "incompetence" stems from middle management juggling direction/pressure/expectations from senior management, and the realities of the program and the engineers. The best managers are capable of managing expectations from above while keeping their team shielded from all that overhead and just keeping the team chugging along and being productive. Other managers seem to have the ability to weigh their team down by allowing too much of the "managment overhead tasks" to leak down to individual engineers. I've seen this vary across programs and managers, and can't say I know all the answers, but I do know I much prefer the role of the IC....