I remember looking at this when I joined MSFT. I think I was 7 management links away from billg. And yes, many of the middle managers fought with each other constantly, not knowing what was actually happening on the coding level.
We had these huge reorgs where all the middle managers would get shuffled, but almost all the ICs and their leads would be doing the same thing as always, maybe once every other year.
Although this article leaves out that even in a flat organization, if you have people that have it out for you, or are trying to manipulate you, they are essentially building an immoral maze as well (and one that by design you will be found lacking).
I once read that nerds never understood that popular people spent all their time being popular, while nerds actually were educating themselves.
Likewise, middle management machiavellis spend all their time scheming for their promotion and enrichment, so any manager that is trying to "do good" will be stamped out because they just don't have the time to compete with full-time schemers.
Eventually all managers of morality will be ejected from that organization.
For those of you wondering why informal hierarchies can often be worse than formal hierarchies I offer an old but still very relevant essay by Jo Freeman, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness": https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
We had these huge reorgs where all the middle managers would get shuffled, but almost all the ICs and their leads would be doing the same thing as always, maybe once every other year.
Although this article leaves out that even in a flat organization, if you have people that have it out for you, or are trying to manipulate you, they are essentially building an immoral maze as well (and one that by design you will be found lacking).