[mattbrewsbytes]

Ideally one would hire self sufficient engineers that don’t cause drama which causes political battles.

A small organization doesn’t need much management, but the larger corporate environment has middle management - managers of managers. This layer is really only there because of numbers. If you have 7 managers with 8 engineers each, one director isn’t going to be able to make big picture decisions for 7 teams, let alone get thru HR reviews for 56 people, salary planning, etc.

What about mediocre and bad engineers? If there are a few and there is a system, they will find a way to meet basic criteria in the tool/system. You’ve heard jokes about teams that measure lines of code, and suddenly people are pumping out lines of code.

When you get a group of 20 or more people together they are going to disagree and some will outright dislike each other. These are the roots of political battles in an org, which beyond small teams, can’t be avoided.

[zpatel]

Yes, Sr. Management & Directors add values. Most first level managers are not effective in resolving disputes between Engineers, but rather just take sides with say one of their top coder, although the opinion of that engineer on say an architecture approach may be not be the right way to go..think you get the idea ? There may be many such scenarios or just lack of maturity or decades of management experience that makes such managers ineffective at resolving conflicts, and hence my point is that they are not required to manage Sr. Engineers with 10-15 yrs experience.