[defined]

This. Seen the same thing in 3 startups. Add me to the anecdata.

It would be awesome if we could get statistically significant numbers of people to report on this effect, although how to avoid selection bias etc. is beyond me atm.

[cableshaft]

Happened at a company I worked for after we were bought by a larger corporation. And we were a company of 500+ employees.

Although we had a CTO that grew up with the company (used to be a programmer there) that reported direct to the CEO at the smaller, now we have no CTO and at least 5 layers in between us and the new CEO.