I say this as someone who's been in the trenches for big global huge companies and smaller ones, in various industries:

If you think the fat is this well trimmed and companies don't have useless managers literally everywhere then you arent looking close enough.

And I'm not just a dissatisfied grunt in a cube saying this. At the moment I'm in leadership myself, an engineer leading a hierarchy of engineers, and surprise surprise, here i am again in a situation where managers with no technical knowledge, 5 of them in fact (4 of which serve no real role) are absolutely devastating my team's productivity.

Nothing like the feeling of just praying that management with no knowledge will avoid telling me, the SME, to lead my team a direction in direct contradiction with what my SME knowledge and experience says needs to happen.

I don't even do engineering anymore. I flew too close to the sun and now my job is sitting in on meeting after meeting with managers and trying to make them understand what we, the company, actually does and how while they propose dumb idea after process change after "new verbiage for our key objectives". I tell them why things aren't possible or why things aren't smart and i pray they listen, and they don't because they're managers so they must know what they're talking about. /s

When I got here, engineering was in total disarray due to bad leadership. I took over, fixed it up, we got a solid 18 months of blissful extreme productivity. Then manager after manager started to coalesce around the output because God forbid work get done without them being there to catalog it in their end-of-year review as though they're somehow the cause of the savings. Now we're on 12 months of being back to the shitshow because the SMEs are once again beholden to the mid level managers. As a result myself, my #1, and my #2 are all about to jump ship. Good luck, management.