Ask HN: What will the impact of AI be on Engineering Management?

Managers spending all day sending GPT generated emails to eachother trying to look busy.

I'm a terrible writer so I'm hoping chat GPT will allow me to write better emails to support my teams.

I could also see use cases to write better reviews. I've experimented with adding my 1:1 notes and coming up with a yearlong summary. The result was really great and neatly summarized a person's accomplishments.

One interesting strategy was to ask chat gpt to summarize a communication in a few ways like. I'm skeptical of this person's ideas, what other alternatives to this thought could be? Can you give me other perspectives? The results were interesting and helpful.

My friend, who decided to become a manager early in his career, and I had a discussion on this. He thinks that one key reason for management is due to inefficiency in communication. With AI, individuals can achieve more than they could before. What can only be done by a team of individuals with different skills can be done by a single person in the future. Hence the need for management will decrease.

He predicted, in the future, there will be a few mega companies that develop foundational technologies and millions indie or small businesses (without management) built around those technologies.

We later saw this blog post that shares the same view.

https://mazzzystar.github.io/2023/05/10/LLM-for-individual/

The day that I can ask an AI to analyze my team's history of activity in git & jira and then suggest actionable changes that would improve productivity and observability for team members and for the team is the day that I can semi-retire and spend my afternoons at the beach.

Hopefully it will eliminate all the boring shit like managing JIRA, giving status updates, and following up with communication tasks. Another large part of my day is also troubleshooting random things, so hopefully AI will benefit my team before I have to get engaged.

I don't think AI poses a risk when it comes to setting engineering priorities and building the roadmap. If it could do that, it could probably just build the entire system anyway.

EMs are there for the human aspect of engineering, so I also doubt it will impact hiring or EM-engineer ratios.

I do expect the bar to being an EM to be higher as the job will be more technical and less project management.

In my current company, managers are selected to know mostly nothing about the tech field of their group.

In such a case, manager's main task is just selecting people for one or other project randomly.

Consequently, they don't do anything sophisticated enough for being benefited by chatGPT. Maybe enjoy their free time.

Professional engineering is heavy on licensure requirements and personal responsibility. I'd imagine that professional engineers are likely to use AI to generate scenarios, that they will then evaluate fully before signing off on.

As an engineer manager, I still try to write all of my emails myself.

I recently tried to take something I wrote and see if ChatGPT could improve it. I did not like anything it returned. It was a bit too wordy.

Dropping AI buzzwords will becoming increasingly important. Very important for managers to stay one step ahead in this area.