Comment by siren2026

That was true for the old school hard tech companies (Hardware chips, Intel, IBM, etc)

Google and other adtechs are not hard tech, that's why they have so many managers)

An underappreciated reason for this is empire building: Someone needs to be promoted to Senior Director and one way to do this is to add a layer of management: Adding 5 headcounts that essentially do busywork makes it easier to advocate for why your org is very important and why you should be promoted.