It's very difficult to fire people in most countries. If you've got someone who was never particularly good at their technical job (or hasn't kept their skills current), you kind of have to transfer them to a hands-off position to keep them from damaging anything directly, and the only way to do that and everyone saves face (i.e you don't get sued for constructive dismissal) is to promote them to management.
And that does protect the codebase and the production systems in the short term, in the long term, all the reports they insist people write that don't create any new and valuable knowledge, all the meetings they insist people attend that don't communicate any information or make any decisions, etc, are enormously damaging, not only directly in lost productivity but in the damage to the morale of those who are still motivated.
So most management really is bad, but not because of anything inherent in the management role - because the wrong people are doing it for the wrong reasons. There needs to be much more up-or-out http://thedailywtf.com/articles/up-or-out-solving-the-it-tur... .
And that does protect the codebase and the production systems in the short term, in the long term, all the reports they insist people write that don't create any new and valuable knowledge, all the meetings they insist people attend that don't communicate any information or make any decisions, etc, are enormously damaging, not only directly in lost productivity but in the damage to the morale of those who are still motivated.
So most management really is bad, but not because of anything inherent in the management role - because the wrong people are doing it for the wrong reasons. There needs to be much more up-or-out http://thedailywtf.com/articles/up-or-out-solving-the-it-tur... .