Most management positions fall into this category.

Company my wife works for has her as a 'supervisor' (which in their lingo is lower than a manager but still salaried but with no authority).

She 'supervises' 20 people and is tasked with project management between departments. She even hires and fires her own people.

Her boss? He's considered a manager but only "manages" 6 people in the department he manages (Network Operating Center), but then is in charge of her also, but he is not in charge of her 20 people. Just her. Sure, he could fire her people but he does not interact with her people and merely relays information to her to relay to her 20 guys.

The only difference in what she does vs. what he does is that he reports to the IT manager who manages only 6 managers (including my wife's boss).

The IT manager does not interact with her and instead of coming to her for updates on her team (of 20), he reaches out to her boss (who manages 6 people + my wife) who then reaches out to her to relay that information to the IT manager.

Her boss also goes to meetings, but they are literally meetings between him and the IT manager, but not the other "managers" of the different parts of IT. They have 'Systems', who has a 'manager', Security, who has a 'manager', and a couple of other tangentially-related departments that got condensed into IT.

She runs the help desk, her boss runs the NOC (doing the same thing she does, but more money, and the only added responsibility is reporting to the IT manager).

Her boss is completely pointless. He once was on FMLA for 7 months and things ran much smoother because then she relayed everything to the IT manager and didn't have to wait for 'updates' on anything she had going on. She'd just go straight to his office.

Not only was she then in charge of her Help Desk team of 20, but then also the NOC team of 6.

Yet he makes more than her, is her boss, and does far less work.

She is also in charge of holding other managers accountable because of their ticket queues getting out of hand while hers is basically non-existent. But, she has no "authority" over them.

So they tasked her with holding weekly meetings with all other ticket-creating/solving department managers to get reports about why their tickets are high, what they're doing about it.

She then creates spreadsheets, graphs, etc. about all of their ticket queues, then, relays that to her boss (who is over the NOC), who then relays that to the IT manager.

And THEN, the IT manager's sole job is to relay this information to 1 person - the CIO. The CIO's job is to sit in meetings all day and deal with budgetary issues for the department.

It is absolutely insane. They could make the IT manager in charge of supervisors/managers of all departments, then relay that to the CIO, or, just make the CIO directly responsible for the department managers and let accounting deal with money and then let procurement deal with procurement.

It's absolute insanity. They literally create these positions for some of these men - like her boss, for example.

This is a relatively small company, so I can only imagine how ridiculously bloated the CoC gets in a huge company.

Worth noting that all managers in the company are men. At least in IT. She's the only 'supervisor' in IT and they created that title for her to retain the salary she had, but would not call her a 'manager').

**Edit**

I just reconfirmed and he actually oversees 12 people in the NOC (it's a 24/7 facility) + her.