[Ifkaluva]

I think this post will age poorly.

Middle managers were not “waste”, they served a social function of creating stability and managing workloads.

I think the proposed “new model” probably doesn’t scale. Also probably a single human can’t comfortably do that many things.

We don’t build orgs to maximally squeeze every drop of productivity and leave behind an empty human husk. Orgs have grown as a negotiated balance between the desire of the capitalist at the top for high productivity, and the desire of the contributors at the bottom for stability. The layers of management in between provide an interface that makes this possible.

We’re going to see a couple years of companies crashing and burning trying this “AI native” thing.

[wood_spirit]

Middle managers were about making work legible https://www.seangoedecke.com/seeing-like-a-software-company/

Now that wasn’t the most efficient and it has a whole bunch of perverse incentives too, but it’s what happened as companies got big enough to hire people to do the work that could be delegated because those delegatees got status from having people to themselves delegate to.