Most of middle management is bullshit. We know it, the managers know it, and even the owners know it. The owners would love to remove the bullshit managers to cut costs, but they only have limited knowledge of which people and branches of their companies are bullshit, because figuring that out would be actual work, and owners don’t work.

Meanwhile, middle management is compensated based on how important they sound. How many layers of management there are under them, how many employees total, how big their budgets are. The manager with more under them than their peers gets promoted. So management is largely trying to maximize costs at all times.

But the owners know that middle management is bullshit, so some guy who’s obviously just maximizing costs will get fired. Every cost needs a justification related to profit, because that’s all the owners care about. And profit comes from exploiting maximizing the productivity of the workers, of course.

So renting office buildings is good for managers, because it makes their budgets bigger, but they need to justify the expense to the owners, so they need to claim that bringing you into the office is a vital part of how they exploit your labor your productivity.