Oh I know it happens, but that doesn't make it good.
The only way to get a lot of layers in a small org (200 people) is to have very low fan-out, which is inefficient.
For simplicity, imagine a company with 4 C-level executives at the top. Each of them manages 4 reports, and each of their reports manages 4 people, and so on down the layers. In this simplified example you could have 340 people in a company and still only have 4 layers of management (4 + 16 + 64 + 256).
You could even get the 4 C-level executives and their 16 top-level reports into a single room every week if you had to.
The company in this blog post has almost half as many people (according to parent comment) yet the bureaucracy described within sounds like they have layer upon layer of removal to the point that it's a full-time job for many people just to move information around.
The only times I've seen this happen have been when executives get too focused on 1:1 communication and like to fill their calendars up with recurring meetings with fixed sets of participants. The 1:1 communication turns into a slow game of telephone and the recurring meetings consume all of their time with talk that feels like "work" but could have been replaced with a lot of as-needed e-mails and targeted meetings organized on demand.
Generally in a healthy org it’s more like 8-10 direct reports per line manager.
At 200 people you should probably be still at around 3 levels deep. The VP Eng with 8 line managers could easily run a 70 person engineering team
Maybe throw in a single director to help share the load and for succession planning
But I agree likely what is happening is too many managers with smallish numbers of directs creating a lot of unnecessary layers and then all the extra management work that comes with that
I've seen such bureaucracy at a previous employer. Company is a little over 25 people (including a few that are contractors.) There are 3 people in the C suite, at least one VP, at least 4 directors. There were endless meetings, like you describe. The whole management structure needed to be torn down. People would rather go to meetings and update internal status spreadsheets instead of doing any real meaningful work.
