Comment by alphazard

I'm not sure how far along you are in your career, so maybe you are just realizing this: Most managers are bad at what they do. It's probably an 80/20 split of net-negative to net-positive managers. e.g. Everything speeds up when they go on vacation, or get sick.

The 80% of bad managers thrive in the ambiguity of their performance. They want to touch processes, and projects, and meetings and schedules, and things, to get their fingerprints on as much stuff as possible, without making a change substantive enough that it could make things noticeably worse. That way they can say they had an effect, but without the risk of a change that could backfire.

If you and a bunch of coworkers politely ask to transfer teams (not all at once), but spread out over a few weeks. Management will usually scramble to figure out which of their changes was actually impactful in the wrong way. Your boss doesn't know what he's doing, upper management doesn't either. They just want the big salary, and the diffuse responsibility.

Put yourself in their shoes: You're in charge of a team, you can't even really tell how it's going because it's just beyond your skillset, and now there are a bunch of people who don't like working on the team. Or the guy above him: You moved things around, and now it turns out one of your managers totally dropped the ball on the new team, and now you have to do extra work to retain and move people. Contact with reality is brutal.