[tgv]

That's one of the reasons I work for a small company. There's just one boss, and he's also what in the US would probably be called VP, both formally and informally (there's a difference between the formal and informal hierarchy). He knows his limits, is technically adept although he doesn't know much about programming, and just cares about usability. As a consequence, there's no politics, no endless meetings (yes, I've done Agile too elsewhere, with those retrospectives, planning meetings and pointless burndown charts). There's no other team blocking me or forcing me to do something differently (because of course teams are self-organizing, but heaven forbid if you do something that touches the domain of another team). The salary is somewhat lower, but I actually enjoy my job.

Middle management is just nepotism, where incompetent/not-caring managers hire from their network to gain power.