Replacing Engineering Managers with AI Agents

"Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0" - it's getting closer.

Time to re-read Marshall Brain's "Manna".

So I guess the coders get replaced first after all? Sounds like a more natural progression. There's more of them and it's easier/faster to tell if their work is getting done. And they don't need any "empathy" while writing their code (or so they think at least, is what seems to explain a lot of UI decisions...)

probably because AI is awful at coding anything complex but the social and communication skills these companies value so hard are actually easily done by AI. The social elite are far more replaceable by text. What a world we live in.

On the one hand if this is personal to each individual and if the data feed is entirely private so that only the person interfacing with the agent sees the recommendations, admonishments, and trends...it could be a powerful way to foster more self-improvement. But on the other hand, knowing that another person would wield this with authority over someone else makes it really dystopian. It would be micromanagement to an extreme.

People need a concrete goal or specific feature to work on, one that takes time and space to work on. You can't easily or usually create units of measurable work where everything is a story point or a widget. In fact I'd say most of the time the real work isn't like that at all. That's just not how software development works, at least in environments that are conducive to real software engineering.

Any EMAI outputs or recommendations that adhere to and respect the reality of actual software engineering will be of limited value to a business head or a scrum master. It'll offer things like how to improve your work flow, or what tools would benefit your work flow. These things don't translate into more story points any time soon, and certainly not within a matter of days...

> Using real-time data on each engineer's strengths, past performance, learning curve, and even their preferred working hours, EMAI allocates tasks from the backlog. It uses predictive modeling to optimize for both efficiency and team satisfaction.

> End-of-Day Reports: Every team member receives a personalized report detailing their accomplishments, areas of improvement, and resources for further learning. These reports aren't just data-driven and include motivational feedback designed to boost morale and foster continuous learning.

If it's allocating tasks this way from a backlog and trying to give you daily reports, this just sounds like something that would be of interest to a ticket farm rather than to a tech company that is really building software.

This article presents a very strange take.

> It might sound dystopian, but setting emotions aside and viewing it purely from a business perspective, the idea of replacing engineering managers with AI offers potential efficiencies.

A manager is there precisely to optimize for business objectives. They are not your paid friend, therapist or life coach.

The "AI" sea change that obsoletes the manager will first replace the producer.

Consider it from the present day case of out-sourced labour, which is as real and present as AGI.

Managers are more likely to be valued when out-sourcing production, as business/human organization and communication become the bottleneck vs. productive capacity.

If the value of production is driven even lower via generative automation, such that automation is cheaper than outsourcing, then managers are at risk because they exist by ratio relative to the productive labour force. Out-sourcing often leads to an expanded labour force due to market imbalances (3 for the price of 1!). This results in an increase in management before automation >first< reduces the size of the labour force, which only then reduces the need for management.