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Presumably. But all the contracts I've worked on with three letter agencies have had probably a 5:1 ratio of managers to productive people. It's truly incredible. I'll be in an explicitly technical meeting, with explicitly planned technical goals (test connectivity, simulate some activity across systems, etc), and there will be literally 10 project managers hobnobbing for the entirety of the planned time, and myself and one other sad overworked engineer on the other side. Eventually the meeting reaches it's planned end time, all the project managers excuse themselves to attend other meetings, and myself and my technical counterpart finally get to do the work the meeting was planned around in the first place, an hour or two after the start of the meeting, eating into time we were supposed to be doing other shit.
But these fucking asshole project managers just invite themselves from meeting to meeting, destroying productivity, and treating it like a social function. It's been like this for the last 5-8 years I've been on contracts with federal government agencies. At least when this first started, if I had technical questions 8 of the project managers would look around scared and one grizzled old white guy project manager who'd been cowed into silence would finally speak up and show that not everyone there was a sinecure. That hasn't happened in the last 4 years. You just get shouted down by the PMs for asking technical questions in an explicitly technical meeting. They're utterly shameless now.
He retired last year at our company. We only have the other sort now. The outcomes are shit but we still get challenge coins for the great 'success' of projects.
They have to account for their time to tenths of hours against relevant charge codes, that's near 90% of their job.
So much of current year feels like managed decline.
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