alt Hacker NewsI think it funny how much average engineers are beginning to discover the challenges of engineering leadership and program management. This has always been the bottleneck.
It's why managers and PMs want to be in standup. It's why slack exists and engineers are constantly being poked on it. It's why execs always talk about not getting too far away from the work. It's how seagull management happens. It's why program management is a job.
All those behaviors engineers hated about their bosses that kept them away from being focused on the code...they're starting to feel what it's like on the other side and reinventing the solutions instead of just reading a book about engineering management. Maybe we'll rebrand program management to "understanding ops" or something.
I wonder what AI would say about us if given the tokens to complain.
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To me, the biggest hurdle to trying to manage agents like humans is that there's no real continuity, out of the box at least.
You can trying to get around this with RAG and markdown files and skills but you're basically building from scratch the "tools" on how to remember the codebase that you take for granted with people
> I think it funny how much average engineers are beginning to discover the challenges of engineering leadership and program management. This has always been the bottleneck.
It is somewhat new for most ICs to need this skillset, as opposed to tech leads/staff folks. What books would you suggest for this new reality?
Maybe, or maybe you are overly pattern matching on what you what to be true?
I don't think anyone would mind having a competent manager or PM in a standup, someone that is actually contributing towards finding solutions and ways to move forward.
> I think it funny how much average engineers are beginning to discover the challenges of engineering leadership and program management.
This looks like we choose to hear what we want to hear.
The understanding argument is about making the point that "The point was always to augment" the human understanding when we worked with the machines.
Aren't you just taking the same dismissive attitude towards management and doing it to engineers?
I remember when I raised this point like a year or two ago -- in response to someone saying that coding AI made all their work trivial I said something like "if you have multiple agents the work changes and becomes more managerial - don't you think that managers contribute value" and I got a bunch of downvotes and all the responses were like "no manager has ever contributed value." Ahh, good times.
> It's why managers and PMs want to be in standup.
While I agree at face value, I also believe a lot of managers and PMs do not have enough work to justify 40 or more hours of work a week, so attending standup, meetings, etc. is performative attempt at self-preservation.
Of course, there are many managers and PMs that are leading death marches, so I know it's highly workplace dependent.
Actually, project managers could learn a lot from computer science. For example, on scheduling - kanban is the way to go (that's what OS is doing), scrum is BS. Or on planning - planning has a cost which decreases the total throughput.
There is also a variation of Amdahl's law - if you automate more things, the predictability of remaining work will decrease, because it will now take more time.
Also, formal languages still trump natural language. Despite LLMs; I think it's a stepping stone to something better but "vibe coding" will turn out to be unsustainable.
cant wait till the AI starts saying "dont ask me". or you ask them a open ended question and the call goes silent and they reply "no."
I have some experience as a manager, but not a lot (something short of a two years in the same company). I dislike the idea of standups both as a programmer and as a manager. They remind me too much of military drills: something performative, useless, only to keep new recruits busy.
The reason I think that is because it puts communication into a very simplified and regimented framework, so simple and unable to adequately answer the needs of the communicating parties that nobody actually uses it for the intended purpose. The actual communication happens between people who actually need to work on something, in the format that allows more freedom, with more aids, more prep time, perhaps over multiple sessions.
Sometimes, probably, as a manager, you have to work with a very low quality workforce, lacking motivation and simply avoiding doing any useful work as much as possible (eg. some overseas outsourced project that gets paid by an hour). In this case, standups become a soft punishment tool: something to verify that workers showed up to work, that they didn't lie about the progress made so far etc. You would still have to do the former part of the management, but now you also have this kindergarten-teacher style chore on top of it.
I've worked with many engineers who used this knowledge gap to lie and manipulate whether its an engineer lying to their PM or a cto lying to their non tech cofounder. Atleast if you ask AI for a description it won't lie intentionally, unless it was trained on an engineer and picked up the pattern. I do blame the victims though for not being able to detect a lier or act on it once they do
All this pushback against AI is starting to look like a corrupt engineer no longer being able to lie about what they're doing. It happens in every corrupt group pushing against new tech or change
I’ve worked on both sides, so I know they’re actually very different.
As a manager, the first thing you do is get to know your people. Some of them will be very strong and trustworthy. You give them the hardest work, and you ask them the least. That’s how you scale your team’s scope without getting overburdened. And that’s why teams have key people.
But when you work with LLMs, you still need to understand most of the ideas yourself if it’s a serious product. Because in the end, it means nothing to “trust” an agent. You’re the one responsible for what you and the LLM ship.