Thank you for saying this loud!

As someone who is in the job market, I see that a lot of companies have misdiagnosed the productivity problem! In case of meta, they went overboard on hiring too quickly and to manage those people, they hired too many managers. You started with a wrong blue print to begin with and then you blamed the workers. In case of meta, several senior leaders need to be fired for building this culture. Sadly, we see the victim shaming as those on managers.

Another problem is that a lot of the FAANG (Amazon excluded) has rewarded innovation and collaboration over impact and execution. The managerial interview loops (having been a manager at several FAANG) are focussed on hiring a technically strong manager and not a technically strong people/product manager. So, the checks and balances to build high impact teams have been skewed, because they prioritized for the wrong metric! And people managers have no incentive to push for strong execution because they are rewarded for people-happiness and not product impact. Seen several L7's and L8's getting promoted for "innovation" and they have not launched a single noteworthy product even used by a couple of million users while at the same time burning millions of dollars of company revenue!

I see some startups api'ing FAANG blindly and they miss the point that their pay bands are not in the 95 percentile of SWE bandwagon and they don't have unlimited time or money to let engineers do whatever they want. This is where manager becomes so crucial to get a strong roadmap in collaboration with product or even being the product person at times.