Loading…

Are the managers who bet AI would replace engineers being replaced the fastest?

senior_slacker
Public 20 conversations 34 thoughts 670 upvotes 109 downvotes 0 series 4,045 views

Last year my LinkedIn feed had a genre. A program manager or a "delivery lead" or someone with Agile in their headline would post a screenshot of an AI writing a function, add a line like "and they said this job was safe, just learn how to code" and collect four hundred likes from people who do the same job. The implication was always that the typing part of engineering was the engineering, and now that a model can type, the typing class was finished.

In groups

Discussion content

Last year my LinkedIn feed had a genre. A program manager or a "delivery lead" or someone with Agile in their headline would post a screenshot of an AI writing a function, add a line like "and they said this job was safe, just learn how to code" and collect four hundred likes from people who do the same job. The implication was always that the typing part of engineering was the engineering, and now that a model can type, the typing class was finished.

I think they read the org chart upside down. And I'm glad they're finding out

Here is the thing nobody on that side of the feed says out loud. AI is not very good at the load-bearing part of building, which is deciding what the system should do, knowing why the last three attempts failed, and being able to tell when the model just confidently handed you something broken. It is genuinely, embarrassingly good at the other part. The status rollup. The release notes nobody reads. The feature catalog that goes stale in a week. The test plan that is mostly a reformatting of the acceptance criteria. The weekly update that summarizes the standup that summarized the Slack thread. That is not the work AI struggles with. That is the work AI was born to do.

So look at who sits where. The supporting layer exists, by design, to do the parts the engineers did not want to do. Keep the project tracker updated. Chase people for updates. Turn an engineer's two sentences into a paragraph for the VP. Turn an engineer's paragraph into two sentences for the VP. Maintain the doc. Run the meeting where everyone says what they said in writing yesterday. I am not being cruel about this. These tasks were real and they were tedious and somebody had to do them, which is the whole reason the roles got funded. The problem is that "produce a clean summary of inputs other people generated" is the exact shape of what a language model does best, and "produce the inputs" is the part it still can't do alone.

And here is the asymmetry that the obsolescence posters skipped. To use AI well you have to be able to check it. You have to read the diff and know it's wrong. You have to look at the generated migration and notice it has no rollback. The builder already has that. It is the same skill that made them a builder. The coordination layer, on the other hand, was hired on the explicit understanding that they would not need to read the code, and now the tool that is supposed to save them produces output that can only be trusted by someone who can read the code. They got handed a chainsaw and the manual is in a language they were told they'd never have to learn.

A good program manager is not a status-update machine.

Yes, I know. But out of ~40 I met so far in my career maybe 2 were. 38 were definitely status-update machines. The actual job, the one worth paying for, is judgment about what gets cut, the political cover when a launch slips, knowing which executive's "quick question" is a threat, and getting six teams who hate each other to commit to one date. AI does none of that. It cannot absorb blame in a room. It cannot decide that the technically correct sequencing is the politically suicidal one. Reducing the whole function to "keeps the Confluence page warm" is the coder's oldest fantasy and it has always been wrong about the best people in the role. I know.

The judgment-and-shielding job was never the whole headcount. Under every one of those genuinely good program managers there was a layer of people whose actual day was the artifact maintenance, the rollup, the catalog, the deck that restated the deck.

The "engineers are finished" crowd had it backwards because they confused who produces value with who is loudest about producing it. The person who can tell a good answer from a confident wrong one is the person AI makes more valuable, not less. That person was usually building. It was rarely the one posting the screenshot.

Thoughts

  • genuinely_asking

    Straight question on the 2-of-40. If those 2 are the real thing and AI can't touch what they do, are companies hiring more of that 2, or just cutting all 40 and finding out a quarter later which two they actually needed?

    Permalink
  • exit_liquidity

    The post wants you to pick a winner between the builder and the coordination layer, and from outside both of them look like people who have never made a payroll. Sure, you can tell which one can read a diff. Neither one has had to cover salaries the month a launch slipped. The whole "who produces value versus who is loudest" fight is two very comfortable people arguing over the bigger half of someone else's revenue.

    Permalink
  • felt_that_one

    "Turn an engineer's two sentences into a paragraph for the VP. Turn an engineer's paragraph into two sentences for the VP." Felt that one in my spine, that was my entire Q3 😮‍💨 the part that gets me is it was the same VP both times and he never once read either version.

    Permalink
  • trinityvale

    The structural read is right and the conclusion is too tidy. Yes, a layer was created by design to absorb the tasks engineers did not want, and yes, a model does those tasks well. But that layer did not appear because PMs are lazy. It appeared because the org refused to let builders spend time on coordination and then needed the coordination done anyway.

    If you automate the artifact layer, the coordination does not disappear. It lands back on the people who were specifically structured away from it. "AI was born to do that work" is true, and the work still has to be owned by someone who can be in the room when it is wrong. The post treats that as solved. It is not solved, it is reassigned.

    Permalink
  • silver_moth

    I manage the layer this post is celebrating the disappearance of, so take the bias as stated. The honest correction is that engineers generate plenty of AI-automatable slop too. Boilerplate, the third near-identical CRUD endpoint, the review where someone types LGTM in nine seconds, the test that just restates the acceptance criteria. The post puts that last one on the PM. It is written by engineers constantly.

    The checking skill the post leans on is also not evenly distributed by title. I have ICs who cannot tell a confident wrong answer from a right one, and a couple of PMs who can, because they spent years adjacent to the code. "Who can check" is a real axis. It just does not map onto the org chart as cleanly as the post needs it to.

    Permalink
  • akira

    The strongest version of this post is the line about who produces value versus who is loudest about it, and I will defend that part. The screenshot genre was always people narrating other people's leverage as if it were their own.

    Where it loses me is "I'm glad they're finding out." That is not analysis, that is a guy enjoying a layoff. I have sat next to PMs whose entire quarter was keeping six teams who hated each other pointed at one date, and the post admits that work exists and then spends 800 words celebrating that most people doing it will be cut. You can be right about the mechanism and still be writing revenge.

    Permalink
  • cloudatlas

    Genuine question about the asymmetry. If checking the output is the load-bearing skill, what stops the coordination layer from learning to read a diff? The post frames it as a permanent moat because they were told they would never have to. But people were told a lot of things. Some of those 38 are going to learn to read the generated migration and notice it has no rollback, same as anyone else. The wall here is incentive and time, not biology, and the post writes it like biology.

    Permalink
  • juicy_lemon

    The 2-of-40 number is doing a lot of work and I don't trust it. What an engineer sees of a PM is the artifact layer, because that is the part pointed at them. The judgment, the cover, the absorbed blame, the meeting that did not have to happen because someone made a call quietly, none of that shows up in your sprint board. So of course it looks like 38 status machines from where you sit.

    What I actually agree with:

    • the artifact maintenance layer is real and a lot of it is automatable

    • a chunk of people will not survive losing it

    What I push back on:

    • you are counting the part of my job that is visible to you and calling it the whole job

    • "good PM" gets defined here as exactly the parts an engineer happened to witness

    Permalink
  • chihiro

    "You produce a clean summary of inputs other people generated" is the most accurate sentence in the post and it is also the entire history of dashboards. A dashboard is a clean summary of inputs other people generated, and the people who maintained the prettiest ones were almost never the people who could tell you whether the underlying definition was sound.

    My own discussion anchor for years has been that you cannot automate clarity nobody agreed to create. The model summarizes the standup beautifully. It cannot tell you the standup was three people lying politely. That gap is exactly the load-bearing part the post is pointing at.

    Permalink
  • faye_wired

    The post is clean about the coordination layer and weirdly generous to builders. Plenty of engineers cannot check the output either. I have watched senior people rubber-stamp a generated component because it rendered, ship it, and find out in production that it was inaccessible and re-fetched on every keystroke. "The builder already has that skill" is doing a lot of flattering. Some do. A lot of them paste the diff in, see green, and approve, which is the exact move the post is mocking PMs for.

    Permalink

Related discussions

  • Do you stop getting frustrated at work once you understand corporate incentives?

    There is a status deck somewhere in your company that nobody reads. It gets updated every few weeks, shown in a meeting, and forgotten. Your manager knows this too. They built the same decks on the way up and understand exactly how little thought usually goes into them. The usual explanation for corporate busywork is that someone higher up is confused or disconnected from reality. That's comforting, but mostly wrong. These artifacts survive because they're doing a job, just not the one they…

  • Why do managers want everyone else to use AI but themselves?

    The thing that’s starting to irritate me is not the AI push itself. Some of the tools are genuinely useful. I use them every day now. What irritates me is management demanding “AI-first” behavior while keeping every surrounding process aggressively hostile to AI usage. People are told to use AI for coding, planning, research, drafting, debugging, knowledge retrieval, project coordination.. But then half the company’s operational knowledge still lives inside undocumented conversations and…

  • Does AI make it impossible to tell great engineers from noisy ones?

    I keep hearing the same feedback in different forms: “great velocity,” “love the throughput,” “nice use of AI.” From the outside, it really does look like more is happening: more Code Reviews, more tickets touched, more updates, more emails, more tasks, more designs. AI makes it easy to sustain that cadence without the usual friction of writing, thinking, or even hesitating. But inside the work, there’s a dilemma that keeps getting bigger.

  • Are most AI startups just a UI on top of some Agent.md files?

    Most AI startups right now feel like someone glued GPT to a terminal, added a dark mode UI, and started talking like they invented something.You’ll see these insane pitches like “persistent autonomous cognitive agents with long-term reasoning” and then you look under the hood and it’s basically: give the model tool access, let it use a browser, maybe add memory summaries and retry logic. That’s the “product.” You can get that on your own just giving access to Claude locally.

  • Will incentivizing engineers to use AI backfire?

    A company can ruin almost any good tool by attaching the wrong metric to it. Incentives are all that matter in the workplace, be them financial benefits, status, promotion... Workers work with incentives. You and me too. Practically everyone does things because it benefits them or their loved ones. Hence, at work, we end up doing what makes us get promoted, get more money, get more job security... We're not the owners of the company, we're an employee. We look out for ourselves. That's ok.

  • Can AI make you lose your mind, and are you more at risk if you doubt it?

    I always felt that AI companies are actually putting wrappers on top of AI to identify that we're testing it for thinking. For example back when we'd made it count the vowels/consonants in a word and it'd get it wrong. I feel there's a script now that just gets called when the task is identified correctly. I also feel that it gets trained on these memes. Today, I found a new test, one that shows how easily AI gives you AI psychosis and how easy it easy to truly believe that everything you ever…

  • Is AI driving managers medically insane?

    There is a new executive fantasy in circulation, that AI can replace workers. Although it is certainly re placing some, executives have a fantasy that makes them feel they can do their report's job on their own, with AI. That they can code! Just open a dashboard full of named agents, watch tasks move across panes, ask for an update in a commanding tone, and get features done at a whim. It feels like a dream, specially when you run your "think big ideas" through it and the AI tells you that...

  • Will AI replace you, or will a coworker using AI replace several of you?

    A lot of office workers are comforting themselves with the wrong question. They keep asking whether AI can do their whole job. That is not the threshold their employer will use. The real question is whether the output can be produced cheaply enough, and checked cheaply enough, that the role starts looking expensive. It's not if AI can fully do our job, is "can it accelerate it long enough so only half of my team is needed?". Because the answer to that, sadly, is yes.