Engineers that have to do management and paperwork stuff cry that they're so busy with paperwork that they can't engineer. So management hires a guy for them and they cry about how that guy doesn't do anything.
Why don’t we see companies that “simply don’t” add this cruft, and accordingly sail off into orbit under propulsion of their own excellence?
The reason we don't do that, is because we haven't gotten past being in a famine, zero sum mentality where hoarding power/resources is seen as obviously well and good.
They're afraid of trying anything different than the status quo and don't want to risk it. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", right? Same stuff, different context. Nobody ever got fired for copying Google, Spotify, Twitter, <insert hyped company name here>.
This is the unfortunate truth IMO. Organizations rather get the known "cruft" instead of taking a chance to innovate.
Companies, especially early on, can't afford to innovate on many areas and this is a bet they simply don't want to make.
Now, ask developers if they were less or more efficient when their managers left for a month or more. Every single one I've ever asked was way more productive, happy and surprisingly even upper management was happier because status updates had one less layer of telephone.
This. I see it over and over. People are thinking that copying management practices of successful companies is going to make them successful too. But it only works if those practices are what made the likes of Google successful. And it's not: Google is famous for it's search engine, not for it's managers. It's also famous for it's graveyard of failed projects. Somehow smartest people in the world created the most hated frontend framework.
Having infinite power doesn't typically create good leaders, it creates dictatorships.
Do you think having infinite money naturally leads to good management practices?
Its REALLY important to note the macroeconomics of our current climate. Tech is so, so, so rich right now. There's so much money flowing around that we just brute force our way through every problem. Cruft doesn't matter. Too crufty? Hire someone else to do that cruft. Split that cruft off into another team, that's growth and now my title is Director. Woah, don't touch that cruft, that's my cruft and I'm a Director, I'll die on my paycheck to defend that cruft.
Conway's Law: organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure.
A Correlate to Conway's Law: in capitalist systems, an organization's communication structure is a mirror of its macroeconomic climate. Rich economic climates breed excess.
I'd posit that if you normalized the Y axis on the graphs "amount of time employees at tech companies spend on paperwork" and "the US M2 money supply", they'd correlate pretty well over the past thirty years. If you take the position that's a coincidence, or that the correlation doesn't imply causation in this case... just wait to see what happens to all that previously critical paperwork, pushed by previously critical people in indispensable roles, when the latter graph flatlines or inverts.
Basically I've got skin in the game over the entire product, not just my silo.