Ask HN: Is software going to replace managers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is software going to replace managers?

Ok - so there is a bbc podcast on this I am halfway through - it's pretty darn good but it has a sort of thesis that you can replace the manager part with some co-ordination software.

Which kind of begs the question what is a manager?

Anyway - my first thought is coders are new managers (the real knowledge workers are CPUs and GPUs, and if the job of a manager is to build systems to co-ordinate and improve their workers, then that is a good description of a coder)

and second thought is that an awful lot of what is table stakes for a software project today is replacing co-ordination with software

A simple CO/CD pipeline plus regression testing allows disparate teams to work on the same "system" without serious conflicts, and throw in decent feature flaggging and much of the "programme manager role is gone"

it's late, but I am interested in peoples thoughts

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A managers job, before anything else, is marketing.

Marketing to employees that they are contributing. Marketing to employees that the promotions they got are good, marketing to employees that the promotions they didn't get aren't because they didn't contribute greatly. Marketing to people above that their employees deserve promotion. Marketing to people above that they need more resources/headcount. Marketing to other teams that the priority that rewards them most isn't as important as what rewards your team the most. Marketing to new hires that it's a great place to work. Marketing to employees that could leave that it's a great place to stay. Marketing that the companies vision is great. Marketing that what the employee wants to work on isn't as important as the promises the team made.

Managers are salesmen.

I don't think software is going to replace that any time soon.

No, that isn't their job, that is what they do but it isn't their job. The owners would gladly replace lying managers who fudge numbers with an AI that never betrays them and communicates problems accurately.

If you just replace one manager you get the issues you enumerated, but if you replace all managers with AI then all of that just disappears and the AI just has to prioritize and make decisions according to the will of upper management. This would replace most middle managers, so no more need for shitty corporate politics.

Managers that fudge numbers are a result of pressure from the people over them. The owner is ultimately responsible for creating a system of incentives where lies are preferable to the truth. See: Russia's Putin

Thinking that something is easy because it can be stated easily, is the most standard of engineering errors. "let's go to the moon." Simple idea, 400,000+ people to implement.

Replace all the managers with AI is similarly a simple idea for which it is easy to think of how it might work, but much harder to think about all the ways it wouldn't and the incredible complexity of doing so.

AI isn't just a black box that complexity goes in and the result you want comes out. Figuring out the result you want is an incredibly complex thing to think about alone.

I think you think being a manager is both more mechanical and less skilled than it is.

That's before even thinking about how dystopian mental laborours plugged into an AI management matrix like system optimizing for "high output" is. You think an owner is going to optimize for well being, or do you think the standard owner would prefer to burn out employees and get a new ones when the current ones are exhausted?

Extreme ownership is a very good book. I think you would get a lot out of reading it.

Don't under-estimate the value of soft-skills. Dealing with people is not an easy thing to master, and there will have a need for good communicators and leadership skills to get things done. Being technically competent doesn't automatically make you a good manager.

I sit almost directly outside my manager's door. Today he spent nearly two hours listening to one of his people rant about someone else in the company. By doing so, he reduced the odds of that employee quitting. You can't replace that with software.

Chats are infinitely patient though

It s no coincidence that the first chatbot was a psychotherapist

In my experience, a lot of task coordination is expected of engineers themselves. Of course managers still pass things along from higher levels, but it's common for teams to dole this work out within themselves. In theory, this should free managers up to do more meaningful work - ensuring their directs are happy and have the tools to achieve their career goals.

Edit: what was the podcast?

>> Which kind of begs the question what is a manager?

I've come to realise there are two basic kinds of manager.

Firstly there's the one who interacts primarily one on one. He is able to understand the big picture, knows something about what's being done (enough to technically understand it) and identifies where communication between engineers needs to happen, or where one member of the team is getting off track.

The other kind of manager doesn't really have that understanding. Their approach is regular meetings, with all team members at every meeting, regardless of the topic. These meetings are often on a regular schedule, like every Wednesday afternoon. Outside of these meetings, you pretty much do whatever you like.

The first kind is typically preferable. Stuff gets done, better and quicker. The second kind gives you more team cover - everyone hears you warn about an upcoming issue so there's less dispute later and you don't get blamed behind your back. These projects though seem to take a lot longer (perhaps because more time is lost in meetings).

So which kind could an AI replace? Well in one sense the second. A shallow understanding, a common forum for engineers to discuss issues, requests for time-lines etc. Sure, seems like a sufficiently good AI could stand in for done managers.

The first kind though is much harder to replace. They have insight (can see issues coming before they happen), experience (we need to get hardware requirements in early because purchasing dept is slow), good people skills (Jane is capable, give her a task, she'll let you know when it's done, Bob is insecure, he needs praise every day) and so on.

So I guess the answer to your question will depend a lot on the managers, and management, you have experienced along the way.

There are two types of managers 0 or 1s. But to many most are nulls (or not set) until something goes wrong and you quickly find out if they are a 0 or 1

Short answer is no.

In terms of co-ordinating the work, it's not about make sure that work is getting done, it's about making sure that the right work is getting done at the right time. Usually the role of the manager becomes wrangling all the stakeholders, both inside and outside the team to make sure everyone knows what is going on and is happy with what is being done. But this is a small part of the job as generally it's obvious what needs to be worked on next.

In most cases the majority of the time is going to be spent dealing with people issues. You'll be dealing with problems better handled by therapists, conflict resolvers, employment lawyers, immigration lawyers, and negotiators. But these problems will wash up at your door, usually at 3pm on Friday, and you'll have to triage them simply because there is nobody else to handle them (or the people who are supposed to be dealing with them aren't doing their job).

A good manager is one that knows people, and also knows how to work both within the system and also around the system. And more importantly knows how to get the best of people under difficult and sometimes impossible circumstances.

So in summary, its about people.

Yes becauwe of incentives.

People low in the hierarchy will prefer companies that offer "AI managers" because of transparency, bias and perceived fairness

Low level workers on the other hand do not manage anyone else so nobody wants them replaced

No. The largest gap, from both developers and AI, is professional level technical communication. You still need people to write that and managers to make decisions upon both it and people as assets. AI does appear to be better at this than most developers I have worked with, so if anything AI will replace developers far before it’s smart enough to replace managers.

Do you have a link to the podcast episode?

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I think a more useful question is “What software would need to exist to make human coordination obsolete?"

Well, I recently founded a startup to tackle exactly this problem!

I’m keeping details private for now, but feel free to email me at hello@taylor.town if you’d like more information about joining our pre-seed round.

I think this is a pretty naive view. You're assuming that everybody in the company is in full agreement on all priorities and the tasks to be performed. You're also assuming that all employees are working for the good of the company and the team.

I hope so. Well, in my experience these "managers" spend about 40-60% of their time in meetings. I hope they don't replace them in this way, otherwise we're really fucked!

Always a classic short story on the topic:

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

I am very interested to know what this podcast is so I can have a listen. Could you please tell us?

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