Seriously, the amount of middle managers I have encountered in by 15+ years of professional life is astounding. Most of them are absolute brainlets who have no idea how to manage people, and have an insanely heightened sense of superiority.
The job I work, I do 4 day shifts working frontline in social services for 90k a year. These guys (middle managers) are taking positions to work 5 days for 75-80k, so taking a huge paycut just so they can waste time in meetings where nothing actually gets done and they just circle jerk each other with phrases like “let’s circle back to that”.
I have come to believe that all these middle management types were the kind of losers in school who were either; 1. Horrifically snarky hall monitor types, or 2; kids who were bullied relentlessly.
Surely these types aren’t just in my industry? It boggles the mind to think anyone would be stupid enough to take a pay cut and work an extra day just for a perceived sense of authority.
Just as a footnote, there is no meaningful promotions (pay or seniority) above these middle management positions in my organisation, so any promotions further would be to very limited director positions that rarely ever come up (there might be 7-8 of these positions in a company of 1000+ staff).