When I worked at efficient tech companies, I had a hard time understanding these articles

It's not humorous but been through exactly that. When the CEO sees degrading performance in the engineering team (and he has little technical knowledge or little knowledge of what's going on in the engineering department), his first intuition is to hire either managers or consultants to understand what's going on and improve the situation. Of course, for him, it would be crazy to just go down and ask a couple engineers what's exactly going wrong. None of the managers is going to admit that the problem is theirs. They fully know that and they know that it being uncovered is the end of their jobs. So they'll keep at it until the whole thing burn down to the ground. The only savior here is a new CEO/CTO.

I think your experience is a bit of an aberration. I’ve much more frequently witnessed purges of the middle management layer. So much so that I thought it was a meme? Office Space “I talk to the engineers so the customers don’t have to”. I’m curious as to what kind of business this company was in.

> Some of the excess managers used the situation to do very little. They'd join a couple meetings, maybe respond to a couple e-mails, then basically disappear. I'm currently at a huge company and this rings true for me. I work with a team of maybe 6-7 ICs during a quarter, but when we compile a slide deck and present the work to higherups I find that the middle-managers (who have never joined a single meeting on this project) have added their names to the slide deck too. I have no idea what they do or how they're involved in the work at all; none of the ICs even mention them during the quarter. Nobody wants to say anything about it, probably because those managers hold power in their position.