Middle management is a tremendous market for lemons. It's difficult to do well, and each layer requires a very different skillset. One of the side effects of the hypergrowth era of big tech between 2008-2023 is that a lot of managers were needed to support the amount of hiring, and they weren't very well trained, and often they could claim success for a rising tide almost by default as long as they didn't do anything too blatantly stupid.

The Peter Principle is of course well-known, but one of the insidious things is that once you have enough incompetent management and they are entrenched for a while, they will teach all the wrong lessons to an entire generation of new hires coming in. Due to the incentives and optics of large orgs, managers tend to spin everything in a positive light publicly, and the real unfiltered discussions of failure happen in tighter circles. At some point a lot of "successful" folks can have job hopped their way through a bunch of brand name companies just cargo culting on what they've seen done before with no real understanding of how their work actually impacts the company's bottom line.

This is one of the reasons I'm incredibly thankful to have spent most of my early career in small companies and startups where the big picture was so much easier to see.