So the idea isn't the manager is incompetent but his managers are so bad they are a net negative and cause so much disruption that a full time employee is required to deal with it.
Alternatively: The broader organization has requirements around accounting, planning, forecasting, resource allocation, etc. that are orthogonal to the engineer's job but critical to the company for legal, regulatory, and financial reasons, and managers exist in part to handle that stuff so that the engineer does not need to.
They could all be great managers and literal geniuses and it wouldn't matter. Each person you add to an org increases the number of connections and communications required to do something.
To get anything done I have to get Safety, and Compliance, and Marketing, and Sales, and Project Management, and Vendor Management, and Product Management, plus the Product Dev Team, plus any sister Dev Teams, plus QA involved. Also gotta check with Security, and confirm our Infra team can host it.
Inevitably these people will have their own things going on and may not be available. They will have to wrestle with their own complexity. This leads to meeting after meeting. Then there will be paperwork. A lot of it. Maybe I don't need most of those teams involved but I need sign-offs about that.
Plus each of those teams is there for a reason. If I ignore Compliance we get sued -- and each lawsuit is going to cost a lot more than the cost of those meetings. If Marketing isn't involved then the product launch will screw up and the offering won't go anywhere. If QA isn't there than the product will suck, or maybe screw up catastrophically.
Even if every single manager, every single C-level, every single team lead and Sr., is a bonified genius, it's still going to be a mountain of lame, pedantic work. If there was a way to ditch that then I'm sure, somewhere, one of these MIT Berkeley Disrupter-types would have done so, but the reality is that's how any org larger than like 100 people is going to work.
It’s the peers and stakeholders that are the problem; no one knows what they need, and everyone knows what they want, and if they aren’t responsible for the work they’ll always try to include everything and declare it a must-have. And you’ll get those who escalate over nothing, people actively working against you (because they disagree with the project goals and got overridden, or wanted to own it themselves), people who are necessary but apathetic / busy, people who are angry about something else but take it out wherever they get the chance to, changing requirements and sudden timeline shifts/deadlines because of events outside of your control… etc
At least when there’s someone with strict authority involved, these things can be resolved pretty quickly — everyone defaults to authority. But that’s rare; most projects involve multiple domains, each with authority over their dominion, and opinions on what the others need to be doing (and all trying to minimize their own responsibility and risks, by both simplifying the project, but also offloading it onto their peers).
Ultimately coordination between parties is inherently a bitch.
