Serious question then: if you were the CEO/CTO and were employing 10,000 engineers, what would you do without middle management? Would you have 1k+ line managers each managing <10 ICs and then... yourself? How would you coordinate work, hire, or do anything, really?
I'm not saying corporations execute on this flawlessly, just any time when I wonder what I would've done myself, I end up with a similar structure (maybe a bit flatter)...
I think the answer is, "you don't really need 10,000 engineers". You can do a lot with small teams of engineers. This was true before AI. Macintosh was designed and built from scratch with a team of 3 which eventually peaked at 20-30. Does anyone seriously believe a company building a web app needs 10,000 engineers?
"web app" covers a lot of surface though. Yes, if the web app in question is a static site that AI can shit out in 20 minutes, it doesn't need 10,000 engineers, but what about building, and running, and operating something like, say, Instagram. Which has a web app. End-to-end, all of it, down to racking servers in data centers across the world, 10,000 engineers sounds reasonable. So start by defining what this hypothetical webapp and how much kubernetes is involved.
I heard Microsoft has 14 layers of middle management just for the xbox team.
14 layers!!
There are people whose sole purpose is to have meetings to pass information to other people, who will then have meetings about who to have meetings with.
Are their any handicap for measuring Baboon middle management capabilities and capacities to account for the unique challenges of interpersonal challenges Baboons face with each other vice homo sapiens? I imagine smiling and showing ones teeth can have unintended hurdles if not accounted for.
What showing teeth does depends on their body language. I don't know
"The famous primatologist Robert Sapolsky has spent decades studying baboons and has described how status, alliances, conflict resolution, and coalition-building resemble politics inside human organizations"
Baboons are a good example for studying mammal social management strategies, which humans also do.
They are organized by dominance hierrarchy, like humans, but baboons have a distributed leadership.
I think we could learn a lot from baboons when it comes to management
You know, as an IC, if I get get the level of introspection you can get from building distributed systems, and that with reasoning/thinking traces from LLMs, I think I'd prefer the entire level of middle management made out of LLMs rather than humans. It'd be helpful to be able to see exactly where their logic suddenly took a skip out the window.
At least those LLMs write code. Those middle managers are just there to turn the screw, most often have no clue what effort it is to write code, and what effort is it to run the thing. Just holding a fucking whip and reporting kpi’s.
Same, LLMs also don't have the same biases, workplaces could become more accessible and inclusive and the managers would actually have deep knowledge about the subject.
I'm not saying corporations execute on this flawlessly, just any time when I wonder what I would've done myself, I end up with a similar structure (maybe a bit flatter)...