Managers are a necessary component of any sizable enough team, sure. The problem these days is that middle management doesn't really do it's job, and instead does the opposite by imposing their will and by getting in the way as they fight to maintain territory and climb the ladder themselves. It only takes a short while before middle management becomes this corrupt and worthless layer, especially if you hire them from the outside (already corrupted). Middle management also tends to suck due to lack of training and due to conversion from an individual contributor to manager being seen as a promotion and a path to executive leadership. The skills required of a manager and those required of someone in an individual contributor role are usually very different, and also the skills required of an exec are different from those required of a manager, so what's present are three separate paths that should be prepared for and climbed separately, but that often gets lumped together.

Better training would yield better middle management, so would a breaking out of this long held notion of territory and holding your employees down. I'm almost convinced that all managers care about are climbing the ladder, holding their employees back (to not lose them, to not have to deal with a threat of someone better, and to be able to take credit for everything the employee produces), buffering against lawsuits, and protecting their territory. That's it.

Sure there are some common threads among all career paths, but that is to be expected. The problem is that the individual contributor to middle manager role change isn't a promotion but a career change, and so is the change from middle manager to executive.

It's also a shame, because by the time most individual contributors are done climbing through the middle management ranks whatever energy, passion, naive ambition, and leadership ability they had is probably long gone (beaten out of them), and what's left is nothing more than the same old thing. This is especially bad if they also had grand visions of what the future could be, but by the time they are done climbing the ranks, they are just another bean counter looking for the next headcount trimming and for a way to meet this quarter's goals at the expense of the long term.

It's always easy to tell what happened to the good players that got beaten down while climbing the ranks, because the originally corrupted will play that good guy's misfortune as though it happened to them. They just love taking what they've done to other people, then playing it back as though it happened to them, not other people. Just listen to the excuses and "sob stories" of a corrupted management, and you'll get a good idea of what they'll do to you if you enter the race with any form of talent, potential, or ambition.

There should be a path for those that want to remain individual contributors, for those that want to be middle managers, and for those that want to end up in a leadership/executive role straight out of school. I understand the lack of incentives that a split among these roles would create (who would want to just be a middle manager with no path to senior leadership?), but that's something to be worked through. Someone can leave the individual contributor ladder and begin on any of the other ladders, but they should understand that this is a career/direction change and not a promotion. This animal needs to be turned on it's head.

And since there isn't one, anyone becoming a manager against their will, or as a stepping stone to executive leadership, needs to keep in mind and constantly remind themselves of what their true ambitions are, because if they don't, then after 8 or so years in middle management, they'll become absolutely worthless and probably corrupt. They also have to fight to hold on to their ability to craft a cohesive vision and making it happen, instead of mismanaging the ambition/vision of their superiors, because otherwise, they'll be ass out pulling the same dubious shit other worthless executives pull, and they'll be beating down star employees (to protect their own skin), rather than creating an environment in which they can get out of the way, and let those employees flourish.