But i'm curious more about bottom-middle management level. In most of the tech companies i know they don't bear any additional risks.
I've observed that feeling that the middle manager is not great relates to whatever subordinate is great at, let's say one is great architect and knows everything about aws and manager doesn't. But the subordinate doesn't event realise strengths of the manager in understanding underlying business value, managing stakeholders, and enough technical knowledge to make right tradeoff to deliver business impact.
One successful experiment we did in our team was to share majority off manager project responsibilities with IC developers for specific projects. The resulting comment from IC to manager was: 'wow I honestly thought you just slack off all day, now I understand how difficult your work is'