It's not the tiers, it's the columns
Interestingly, at my employer it's not so much the tiers as the columns. What I mean is, we have product teams, and they are a bit overmanaged, but no more than you'd expect in a company of this size.
But then alongside we have entire "columns" of non-product teams, whose major purpose seems to be to demand status updates from the actually productive teams, impose pointless rules on us, demand that we update our reports to the latest template (TPS cover sheets, anyone?), and generally drain away time and energy.
For example, we have a "cloud strategy" organization that is supposed to coordinate "cloud strategy" across all the products. And sure, there's a need for some coordination - but it could easily be a side-gig for a top tech person in one of the product teams. Instead, what we get is an entire management hierarchy with its own SVP, Directors, managers, etc., whose sole contribution is to convene cross-product status meetings, in which a dozen people take it in turn to report their status while the other eleven pay no attention because it's of no relevance to them. (The idea of conducting it as a stand-up meeting, where you only speak if you need help from somebody else in the room, or know something they need to hear, is completely alien).
And we have many, many of these columns. And of course, like all good columns, their sole purpose is to hold things up.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
