[zwaps]

While you are not wrong, many of the cases I observed had managers from all over the world.

I think it's just a symptom. As a manager, you contribute nothing by yourself. You are useful if you have a useful team (ICs) with a good project. To have that, you need to defend yourself against other managers who will take this from you. If you then also want to get prompted, your task is also to vacuum in all sorts of soft power, visibility, decision rights and being-in-the-roomness. It's even efficient, in that case, to destroy efficiency with processes (under your involvement)

As an IC, you are always valuable as you can always create value.

Hence, by having enough managers, you ensure that their competition will destroy the company.

[flyinglizard]

Having ICs with no organization, synchronization or shared vision creates chaos, toxicity and a lot of technical debt. You can easily create negative value. ICs need direction to be successful, and well managed people are much happier in my experience than non-managed people.

[zwaps]

Firstly, management and leadership are not the same thing. Giving direction is the job of a leader. Managers, just like anyone else, are rarely good leaders. They are more likely to give the wrong direction and vision than ICs, given that they typically also know less.

IC's do benefit from coordination, as any team might. That is management. However, having more than the absolute minimum of managers and management attached to a product invariably means an exponential decrease in efficiency.

Any team with more managers than senior ICs such as staff engineers is in trouble. That's because staff+ engineers are the people who's ACTUAL job it is to give direction, force multiplication and avoidance of local minima.

Hence, the nature of the position of manager is that it is very often unnecessary, or only intermittently useful. Therefore, a successful manager is not one who makes the product succeed, but rather someone who creates work that they themselves can and need to solve. Typically, this happens when there is a group of managers where there should be only one.

[ultratalk]

> Well managed people are much happier in my experienced

Emphasis on the well-managed. If the management actually helps the tram achieve their goals and doesn't stifle them, then great. Otherwise, you end up with bloat.

[direwolf20]

A company with only ICs (that produces ICs) is a whole lot more useful than a company with only managers.