Where I work, there are scores of project managers(middle management) that do nothing but attend meetings. They have no clue what's going on and usually send their workers off on a tangent.
The best designers/engineers get promoted into project managers and they get caught up in attending meetings. They lose the best workers that way. The only ones left are incompetent brownnosers.
Where I work, the best designers/engineers are often passed over because of just this. The bad part is that the best designers/engineers are stuck in a title and cannot get the raise they deserve due to policy. This may not be so in a small shop, but in a large corporation it's par for the course.