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by StilesCrisis 44 days ago
> So, a manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship

Right?? I saw that too. My first thought is that any good managers left will be racing for the exit. You can't fake "managing 15 people" with AI. You have to actually have the 1:1s and do the performance calibrations. How are they going to have time left for IC work??
3 comments
alexandre_m 44 days ago
They'll have to reduce these 1:1s and any formal meetings to a minimum (e.g. once a quarter), and deal less with career growth and people conflicts.

They'll switch to async communications for everything, and ideally have a bot that answers Mm-humm like a psychologist on his chair.

More seriously, the solution is to move to a flatter org, but that's a drastic change with unknown consequences for most companies.

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Raidion 43 days ago
As a manager with 10-15 reports at a company you've probably heard of, I think the main question is how much they will need to contribute. I put up a PR or three a week, usually in non-critical path flows or system support, and its honestly fine. I could barely contribute to the productivity level of even one of my junior engineers, but I can debug production issues and ship code AND be a good manager (with a decent work life balance).

I feel like managers should be able to contribute. Managing a good team isn't that hard, though managing a bad team (or a good team in the midst of a ton of bad processes) is a nightmare.

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tracker1 43 days ago
I think you'll have to work it out with your peers and collaborate... we here at $BigCo believe in individual ownership of the process.
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pluc 44 days ago
"IC work" seems to have evolved at Coinbase to mean "supervise AI changes". Then the question becomes how will managers actually review these changes and not just press accept at 3:50.
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dgellow 44 days ago
I assume they will have absurd metrics, like number of commits and token use to,determine how good of an IC you are. So, you start a bunch of agents in the background, merge their PRs without review, while having 1:1 and other meetings with your team. Productivity they call it
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