Survivorship bias. The history of Google's non-attempt to replace managers is almost comically bad. They announced in an all-hands meeting that going forward, all engineers would report directly to Larry Page and all project managers (present at the meeting) were out of a job. In other words, Google thought that managers were effectively useless, fired them publicly in front of the whole company, and didn't try to replace them with any manner of alternative.[1]

Long story short, it's not difficult to "sell" managers when the alternative is anarchy.

I think managers are toxic in an engineering organization, and a disincentive toward expertise; Rational intelligent engineers would be foolish not to abandon their expertise for a more rewarding (financially, politically, effort-wise) management track. That said, I consider it even more foolish to have nothing in their place. Managers serve a variety of roles that will be filled, implicitly or explicitly in any tribe/organization. Further, they resolve the matter of hierarchy and eliminate political position jockeying (while exacerbating other forms of politics).

If you pay attention, you'll see that modern software organizations are straining on the verge of breaking with current management styles. No viable alternative has reached mainstream (except maybe holocracy), but in the coming decade, one will.

In my company, we're replacing the classic management hierarchy with something closer to a federated republic where the various roles of management are broken into separate roles for separate individuals, with the goal of placing engineers on top with multiple peer-based support roles. Something close to this will be the software organizational hierarchy of the future.

[1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2014/04/25/googl...