[karmakaze]

My experience is that most managers are between good and okay, some are great, countably few are obstacles. What's different are many layers of middle managers which I don't deal with directly. A fair number, though not much fault of their own create broken telephone communication pathways. Some are actively out for themselves and growing their little empires, alignment be damned. It's good to maintain good technical communication signals with fewer mis-translation points, so flatter orgs are more agile.