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?
1–10 of 19 posts
Re: Ask HN: What will the impact of AI be on Engineering Management?
#2My friend, who decided to become a manager early in his career, and I had a discussion on this. He thinks that one key reason for management is due to inefficiency in communication. With AI, individuals can achieve more than they could before. What can only be done by a team of individuals with different skills can be done by a single person in the future. Hence the need for management will decrease.
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.
Re: Ask HN: What will the impact of AI be on Engineering Management?
#3Hopefully it will eliminate all the boring shit like managing JIRA, giving status updates, and following up with communication tasks. Another large part of my day is also troubleshooting random things, so hopefully AI will benefit my team before I have to get engaged.
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.
Re: Ask HN: What will the impact of AI be on Engineering Management?
#4The day that I can ask an AI to analyze my team's history of activity in git & jira and then suggest actionable changes that would improve productivity and observability for team members and for the team is the day that I can semi-retire and spend my afternoons at the beach.
Re: Ask HN: What will the impact of AI be on Engineering Management?
#5Managers spending all day sending GPT generated emails to eachother trying to look busy.
Re: Ask HN: What will the impact of AI be on Engineering Management?
#6The day that I can ask an AI to analyze my team's history of activity in git & jira and then suggest actionable changes that would improve productivity and observability for team members and for the team is the day that I can semi-retire and spend my afternoons at the beach.
How do you even do that as a person?
Re: Ask HN: What will the impact of AI be on Engineering Management?
#7The day that I can ask an AI to analyze my team's history of activity in git & jira and then suggest actionable changes that would improve productivity and observability for team members and for the team is the day that I can semi-retire and spend my afternoons at the beach.
i am developing a tool for your semi-retirement, its not there yet but if you are interested in trying it and giving me feedback, i can help you semi-retire sooner :-) . checkout the tool here https://gitimprove.com
Re: Ask HN: What will the impact of AI be on Engineering Management?
#8Hopefully it will eliminate all the boring shit like managing JIRA, giving status updates, and following up with communication tasks. Another large part of my day is also troubleshooting random things, so hopefully AI will benefit my team before I have to get engaged. 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 bui…
correct.It can only help in analyzing jira and surfacing what could be important, human review would still be required. It can't do anything if people are not responding to communication tasks.
Re: Ask HN: What will the impact of AI be on Engineering Management?
#9Hopefully it will eliminate all the boring shit like managing JIRA, giving status updates, and following up with communication tasks. Another large part of my day is also troubleshooting random things, so hopefully AI will benefit my team before I have to get engaged. 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 bui…
> Hopefully it will eliminate all the boring shit like managing JIRA, giving status updates, and following up with communication tasks.
Have you tried automating any of these before? Are there tools out there for this? If not, why do you think that is?
Re: Ask HN: What will the impact of AI be on Engineering Management?
#10The day that I can ask an AI to analyze my team's history of activity in git & jira and then suggest actionable changes that would improve productivity and observability for team members and for the team is the day that I can semi-retire and spend my afternoons at the beach.
Why do you think this hasn't been built yet?