Comment by Wurdan

They indicate that engineers want to spend less time on (slow) processes. That isn't necessarily the same thing as that they want less (middle) managers. I can say that at my current and previous companies (both over 30,000 employees) most of the processes/bureaucracy aren't things that the horizontal middle layers came up with. Most processes are imposed by vertical corporate functions like HR, finance, legal and compliance.

I'm not the reason my teams need to do software supplier risk assessments, or fill in at least 4 different surveys about their wellbeing and functioning as a team, or provide forecasts of their cloud spend for the year, or manage data usage agreements for the consumers of their data in our data lake. Nor is my people leader. But I am accountable if we don't stay on top of these responsibilities which are expected of all teams.