This model doesn't quite make sense to me. The layer of idiocy is extremely expensive-- not only do you have to pay their salaries and associated operations costs, but they also introduce enormous inefficiencies. Everything moves slower. It's hard to find important information because it's lost in a sea of bullshit. People make locally optimal decisions that are suboptimal for the company.
The costs of all this are enormous. Is maintaining this army really cheaper than just handing the reigns to ops people and paying them more in proportion to their increased leverage?
It's not a layer of idiocy - that's a common misconception (which I didn't help with, tbf) and unfair to good middle management. What it is is a layer of isolation. And they do also serve another real organisational need, to help coordinate the workforce. Without such a structure, organisation cost is O(N^2). When your business model is paying smart people $X to build a thing, then selling the thing for 10 * $X, you can't let the smart people know that the thing is sold for that much or they'll start demanding more money (or quit and start their own competing company selling a better product for 4 * $X.)
Yes, because it also makes the ops people easily replaceable. On a small scale you can have a tyrant sys admin controlling a company, but on a company scale, nothing is more terrifying than someone other than the CEO being in control
The costs of all this are enormous. Is maintaining this army really cheaper than just handing the reigns to ops people and paying them more in proportion to their increased leverage?