It seems to be the same in every company. Layer upon layer of managers and supervisors that don't actually DO anything.
Companies would be so much more efficiently run without them, so what causes this?
EDIT: I think I might have something of an answer here thanks for @ABigguhPizzahPieh 's comment/video they posted. So, the notion of "robots are going to take our jobs" has actually already happened, and it's been happening for decades. There's just not enough work to go around for everyone. But reducing the work week from 40 hours is obviously unconscionable in capitalism, because working people aren't allowed to have nice things or better lives, so instead there has grown a massive layer of managerial and clerical type "workers" who are paid to do nothing for 40 hours a week and are miserable for it.
I can think of three reasons:
It's part of the "bullshit jobs" pressure valve to keep unemployment low enough that you don't get riots like what happened in 2020. Capitalism requires people without capital to work to survive regardless of whether the work satisfies real wants and needs. The premise of capitalism comes under question when the surplus created by productive labor is just freely distributed to the unemployed without caveats, without social shame attached.
It's a disciplinary measure for the drones at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy. Having redundant middle managers means diffusion of accountability: workers suffering because of the shit decisions can blame their immediate supervisor or that supervisor's boss for decisions made by a manager three layers above the bottom-tier workers, and executives can pass blame downwards onto immediate subordinates who can then pass the buck to their subordinates and so on. Assigning blame becomes a matter of pointing fingers which means top executives who fuck up or make controversial decisions on behalf of shareholders don't immediately catch heat from a significant portion of the company's workers. A vice president can act on a president's decision to fire or discipline someone and grant the president some degree of plausible deniability, soaking up the hatred while the president can pretend to be the good guy. Every layer adds another buffer to protect top management and shareholders from angry rank-and-file workers.
Middle- and upper-middle-managers soak up some of the surplus value extracted from the rank-and-file. The top management of course get the biggest checks but it's easier to notice the pay disparity if it's just top management getting the lion's share of pay that they clearly did not earn through their own labor. The higher pay afforded to managers (the "M" part of PMC which leans petty-bourgie) means they have the same material stake (qualitatively, if not quantitatively) in extracting more value from the rank-and-file that execs and shareholders do, and this dynamic plays out in a nested Russian-doll fashion in specific departments all the way down to the first layer of managers/supervisors who still do a significant amount of real work.
There's definitely an aspirational "One day I'll be middle management" aspect to this.
Becoming a supervisor or even a director is seemingly attainable. And they're comfortably in the petite bourgeoise. They tend to be more experienced and often have degrees that give them the impression of high skill. So everything looks like a meritocracy on the surface.
Run the business long enough and you build up a relationship with all these people in the surrounding food chain. C-levels probably even begin to delude themselves into thinking "Everyone here deserves this."
I like this idea that they exist as a buffer between workers and the real bosses. I mean, that is literally what a manager is I guess, lol.
I was also going to say something similar to your other point about the system requiring a certain amount of the population to be working/earning (and regurgitating those earnings back into the economy). If managerial bloat didn’t exist, capitalism would probably have to create it.
Another potential answer to OP, modern capitalism requires an intense amount of logistics for all the moving parts to work together, I’m sure the explosion in PMC type positions is also somewhat attributable to that.