Ask HN: What will the impact of AI be on Engineering Management? People have discussed at length how they think AI will change software engineering as a profession. But what do folks think the impact of AI will be on the Engineering Manager's role? |
Ask HN: What will the impact of AI be on Engineering Management? People have discussed at length how they think AI will change software engineering as a profession. But what do folks think the impact of AI will be on the Engineering Manager's role? |
Several of the more useless middle managers I deal with are suddenly writing these long emails that are almost certainly edited GPT generated crap. You can pretty easily generate questions or other things to bog people down with. It’s comical.
I could also see use cases to write better reviews. I've experimented with adding my 1:1 notes and coming up with a yearlong summary. The result was really great and neatly summarized a person's accomplishments.
One interesting strategy was to ask chat gpt to summarize a communication in a few ways like. I'm skeptical of this person's ideas, what other alternatives to this thought could be? Can you give me other perspectives? The results were interesting and helpful.
He predicted, in the future, there will be a few mega companies that develop foundational technologies and millions indie or small businesses (without management) built around those technologies.
We later saw this blog post that shares the same view.
Did I get it right it creates charts for the types of issues your team has, the time spent on them and makes a decision to fire/hire more people? Is that all managers do? You don't even need AI for that.
Sorry to be blunt and I don't mean the tool is bad. I'm replying in the context in which it's being discussed (making managers unnecessary).
I don't think AI poses a risk when it comes to setting engineering priorities and building the roadmap. If it could do that, it could probably just build the entire system anyway.
EMs are there for the human aspect of engineering, so I also doubt it will impact hiring or EM-engineer ratios.
I do expect the bar to being an EM to be higher as the job will be more technical and less project management.
Have you tried automating any of these before? Are there tools out there for this? If not, why do you think that is?
In such a case, manager's main task is just selecting people for one or other project randomly.
Consequently, they don't do anything sophisticated enough for being benefited by chatGPT. Maybe enjoy their free time.
I recently tried to take something I wrote and see if ChatGPT could improve it. I did not like anything it returned. It was a bit too wordy.