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Ask HN: When will managers be replaced by AI?

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Re: Ask HN: When will managers be replaced by AI?

#41

Post by quantadev »

jagger27 wrote: post #34

Managers will be replaced by AI when people are willing to work for them. Does anyone really want that? Who the fuck wants to work for an unaccountable machine who you can’t grab a beer with after work? How much life are you willing to abstract away in the name of “efficiency”? To what end? The exact same thing applies if you are a manager, do you really want a flock of loyal electric sheep to do your bidding? If you…

Yeah, I'm still on the fence about how I feel about this. I mean LLMs are going to be potentially more fair, and there wouldn't be office politics and people being treated unfairly by an emotional easily-manipulated human boss.

Then again the office politics might even get WORSE when people try to trick an AI Boss into blaming someone else for a problem they created themselves. Then again the AI will have a superhuman knowledge of who checked in bad code that broke the product, etc. Lots and lots of trade-offs.

Re: Ask HN: When will managers be replaced by AI?

#42

Post by drdaeman »

ddmichael wrote: post #11
ListeningPie wrote: post #7

A manager has responsibility for the team, how can an AI be responsible?

What does responsibility mean? How does it translate to actual work and skills?

As I get it (and I’m not a smart or well-educated person, so please correct me if I’m wrong or misinformed or talking nonsense), responsibility is status that arises from the recognition of one’s moral obligations. Companies are at least partially formed around shared moral obligations, or put simply - goals. At least without those they become meaningless economic machines, and our culture tends to favor things “having” a meaning.

With multiple agents (of any nature) feedback is essential for the work to be done well - that’s my understanding of how it translates to the actual work getting done.

Re: Ask HN: When will managers be replaced by AI?

#43

Post by zmmmmm »

I hope soon. I hate managing people. If a bot can do all the HR busywork that would be fantastic.

Just now I'm recirculating for the 2nd time a quote for a laptop that admin sent back to me because it had a tiny detail wrong, and then by the time I did the 2nd submission the quote expired. And this is about 1% of the beauracracy to get a new employee started in my org.

Re: Ask HN: When will managers be replaced by AI?

#44

Post by zoechi »

autobodie wrote: post #38
singron wrote: post #8

I think you might not get serious responses, but I think this is an interesting question since I think AI is a better fit for management than many other jobs. Nobody would have believed it 10 years ago, but today AI is more likely to replace a concept artist than an accountant, so it's not beyond imagination to replace a manager even if the ICs are still human. AI excels at summarization, which is a big part of the j…

If a company wants to stay in business, the legal risk of AI bots firing people is probably not worth the cost savings. Until that changes, I don't think there's much to discuss, but that may not be long given the way things are going.

They don't have to admit that the decision was made by AI. One low-wage worker in HR can be the spokesperson who sells it as his decision.

Re: Ask HN: When will managers be replaced by AI?

#45

Post by zmmmmm »

twodave wrote: post #14

IME most managers became managers because they preferred working with and helping organize people to creative contributions. I don’t see the need for any of these functions going away. I see productivity differences. Maybe the roles evolve. I think the real question is how do we best harness the increased productivity? Logically speaking, if each person is 5x as productive because of AI there should be an equally gre…

It would be nice if that was true but in my experience the vast majority got promoted for their success one level down and just found themselves lumped with those responsibilities.

Re: Ask HN: When will managers be replaced by AI?

#47

Post by GianFabien »

autobodie wrote: post #38
singron wrote: post #8

I think you might not get serious responses, but I think this is an interesting question since I think AI is a better fit for management than many other jobs. Nobody would have believed it 10 years ago, but today AI is more likely to replace a concept artist than an accountant, so it's not beyond imagination to replace a manager even if the ICs are still human. AI excels at summarization, which is a big part of the j…

If a company wants to stay in business, the legal risk of AI bots firing people is probably not worth the cost savings. Until that changes, I don't think there's much to discuss, but that may not be long given the way things are going.

Don't know about HR AI-bots firing workers. But only last week there was a news segment about HR AI-bots doing the first level interviewing via video-calls. Which is intriguing since there have been some reports previously about job applicants using AI to enhance their interviews, especially for remote jobs. Could lead to an AI-vs-AI showdown.

Of course, I take such reports with a grain of salt, because I often wonder whether such news items are self-serving product promotions in disguise.

Re: Ask HN: When will managers be replaced by AI?

#48

Post by xackpot »

To replace the mangers, the AI needs to take care of the following pain points (got some help from chatgpt): Hiring and Talent Acquisition: - Candidate pipeline quality is inconsistent. - Time-consuming resume screening and interview scheduling. - Lack of diverse candidate pools.

Performance Management - Biased or inconsistent performance reviews. - Goal-setting lacks clarity or alignment with org OKRs. - Lack of real-time performance insights.

Project Planning and Execution - Estimations are often inaccurate. - Project scope creep due to unclear requirements. - Dependencies across teams delay execution.

Technical Debt and Code Quality - Mounting technical debt slows velocity. - Inconsistent coding standards. - Hard to trace ownership for legacy code.

Team Collaboration and Communication - Cross-team communication breakdowns. - Time zones complicate decision-making. - Meeting overload or lack of clarity post-meeting.

Onboarding and Knowledge Transfer - New hires take too long to ramp up. - Tribal knowledge isn't well documented. - Onboarding processes are inconsistent.

Incident Management and Reliability - Blameless postmortems are rarely actionable. - Alert fatigue from noisy signals. - Root cause analysis (RCA) is time-consuming.

Career Growth and Mentorship - Lack of clarity in career ladders. - Mentorship is ad-hoc and inconsistent. - Managers don’t have enough time for coaching.

Engineering Productivity Metrics - Metrics often feel punitive or misused. - Hard to attribute impact to engineers’ work. - Lack of actionable insights from engineering data.

Cross-Functional Alignment - Product and engineering priorities are misaligned. - Specs often change mid-cycle. - Lack of visibility into roadmap tradeoffs.

Each of these categories will probably need an AI agent in itself and probably an AI agent to control all the other AI agents. It would be a complex system, but will still need some monitoring until it is self-sustaining.

Re: Ask HN: When will managers be replaced by AI?

#49

Post by jcranmer »

ddmichael wrote: post #11
ListeningPie wrote: post #7

A manager has responsibility for the team, how can an AI be responsible?

What does responsibility mean? How does it translate to actual work and skills?

One of the most useful functions of a good manager is to act as a shield for their team from upper management firestorms. That's a role that I think AI is particularly unsuited for, given their tendency to be obsequious.

As a more general role, the idea of responsibility is that the manager has the job of making sure that individual employees' tasks are suited both to their individual competence and abilities and to the corporation's deliverables and ultimate bottom line. This requires making arguments in both directions: in pulling employees to working on things more useful to the company, and in changing the deliverables to capitalize on employees' abilities.

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