Clearly some management is required somewhere in the chain, and if they're any good then they're important. But certain tiers of management seem to largely be pointless intermediaries; especially if they're not as technical as the developers.

I've stopped being skeptical of the general concept of management. I'm no fan of LinkedIn, but Reed Hoffman said something in a talk that instantly changed my entire opinion about the idea of a developer moving up in the hierarchy and no longer writing code. Paraphrased from memory: "You're still programming; just at a higher level of abstraction."