TBH, it was more directed at the fact that poster3etc made it sound like there were about half a dozen people on the "shopfloor" and 300 sitting upstairs telling them what to do which is patent nonsense.
Sounds more like the public sector you are talking about. In my experience of both public and private then it tends to be the case that in the private sector most people (very top layer excluded) add value to the business in some way or they simply wouldn't be there - the people at the top would get rid to protect their own interests and those of the firm.
The top people (imvho of course) tend to be there as figureheads for the buisiness and liaise with others in different businesses on the same level to secure future work. It might seem like they're are just going out on the piss and out to lunch and yep, they are, but there are many other agendas behind that.
I'm very much more in the bottom half than the top half of my company but more things have been sorted over a few pints and a bite to eat than endless meetings in anonymous boardrooms somewhere.
No, I've never worked for the public sector. (Well, actually, I have, but not directly, as part of a contracted private firm, and I'm not thinking of that here.)
The very top people seemed to spend a lot of time doing lunches and so on but to be honest a significant part of the business was schmoozing anyway, so that is reasonable, and they also did do proper work. I might not necessarily have agreed with the decisions and money they made but I couldn't say that their positions were inherently pointless.
However, and this comes both from my personal experience and second-hand from other people, to a great degree there is a "management class" in any business beyond a certain size (say, over 20 people) which is self-perpetuating. Managers decide pay scales and make hiring decisions and when they get into an institutional setting, where they're relatively insulated from both top and bottom and there's no immediate monetary pressure, members of the management class tend to favour each other - and the existence of hierarchy on a functional level promotes it on a social level, too, so that simply being in a position where make decisions as to what somebody else does means that you are a higher monkey up the tree and better than them and deserve more bananas.
The trivial example of this is that it is basically impossible to advance in almost any company of any size without going into management, which is as silly as only promoting people if they stop doing what they are doing at the moment and start fixing servers or doing the post.
Some companies are better or worse for this, and from all I can tell, the public sector (where the organisation is huge and often hidebound) is pretty bad. But I could, if I wanted to reveal personal details and maybe get sued which I really would rather avoid, point out specific examples of supposedly innovative and agile companies who are
awful for this, the reflex response to a problem being "hire another manager to go between this one and that one".
This is a big reason why I am now self-employed.
) and sacking them - thus incurring further expense of recruiting and training someone else and defending an Employment Tribunal. They seem to allow their HR depts to run on automatic and let these cases run their inevitable course rather than deal with them in a reasonble and inexpensive manner.
