[jokethrowaway]

What you said is general agreeable.

Nobody is saying all management is useless - what's being discussed is different philosophies of management.

And I doubt the manager telling you to sit down for 8 hours straight will get more output out of you compared to the one that tell you to get output done by X, working in your own time.

All the problems with performance in companies I've seen were either due to staff motivation (caused by personal reasons, low pay, working on a shitty codebase / project, bored of the same job after years) or because management was forcing too many meetings or not having clear requirements or changing requirements up all the time (being agile still has a cost, even if you stopped writing documentation).