The eye-opening part for me was that until recently I thought useless managers were simply people who wanted to help but maybe didn’t know how; that they actually tried to not get in your way but failed. Now I understand that I was completely wrong. Getting in your way, attaching their work to yours and feeding off of that is not an accident but a consistent, conscious method. Doing manager work is in many ways much easier than anything that requires creativity; not only you can schedule your work and stand by that schedule, but you also don’t have to deal with the psychological effects of failing something that you’re personally invested in. Ideally, society should differentiate between these two things and recognise that doing creative work (be it engineering, design, research, etc.) is harder and more taxing, and less predictable, and reward us accordingly. But in the country where I live (somewhere at the rich corners of Europe) there is this idea that everyone is just as important and should earn similar amounts of money, which has led to an insurmountable amount of administrative jobs and people who love them above everything else. It’s just a small leap from that to “you need to go through me first before you can do what you want”.

You're better off than here in the US, then; here, administrators get paid significantly more than anyone doing work that is directly productive or creative, and generally to advance past a certain point in your career, you must move into administration.

> doing creative work (be it engineering, design, research, etc.) is harder and more taxing

... for some people. and easier for others.

we need both, and there's a need for balance. (and you need more careful administration in some areas and you need a lot more creativity in others. we want Boeing to be careful, but it's madness that we need paperwork for internal remodeling, etc.)