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Comment by nickelcitymario | Hacker News Reader

Close. Automate middle management.

All the things mentioned in the article really are prime candidates for automation. But that's management, not leadership.

Management is primed to be automated. See Marshall Brain's book "Manna" for a great take on what's possible here.

Leadership is not. LLMs are great at doing the right things when there's a general consensus on what the right things are. Best practices, etc.

But what the current technology cannot do, and what I think LLMs specifically could never do, is know when to break the rules.

As Phil Knight may or may not have said (he was quoted in the new Air movie): You're remembered for the rules you break. That's leadership.

A great CEO needs to be a leader first and foremost, and a manager second.

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50% of what middle management is what secretaries used to do. If I ever run my own company I will hire a team of secretaries to work with my developers and our productivity will shoot through the roof. No everyone is organized, good at scheduling, following up on things, focusing at work, interpersonal discussions, sending memos, navigating bureaucracy, etc.

A great secretary allows you to focus on getting development or whatever work you do in and out instead of on the day to day running of life.

I don't want a scrum master, I want a secretary.

As a manager, 90% of what I do as a manager is follow up with people, act as an escalation point for managing timelines, organizing who can do what, and none of this really is a skill related to my actual skillset.

Luckily I am able to commit to 20/hrs a week of development, but I could probably do 35 with a secretary - and use those last 5 hours to focus on strategy, direction, leadership stuff that's actually important.

Hire some psychologists to replace HR and you'll have people stick around forever.

> you'll have people stick around forever

that's not the goal

HR is evil because its goals are evil, not because of the type of people employed there.

If you tell HR that some guy should go, be it a liberal arts major or a psychologist, they're gonna employ any trick they know to nudge the guy out of his job. In fact, the psych might be even more effective

Completely agreed. I was a marketing director for about a year and a half, and I stepped back from it because I was personally spending about 60 hours a week on items I would consider management, which I've never been that interested in. I'm interested in leadership; in building productive relationships; and excelling as both a marketer and developer.

If I'd had a secretary or assistant or something to handle keeping on top of projects and KPIs, I would have been able to focus on being great as a leader. Alas, that wasn't an option, so I got out of the way for someone who excels as a manager to take my place.

On the plus side (and admittedly an aside as well), stepping out of that role allowed me to write and publish a book in 6 months, which is something I'd always wanted to do but couldn't find the time for.

So much this. And also this applies to many roles. I heard similar from people who ran buying and merchandising teams at my old company: “Why are they paying me to file my expense report? An assistant could do this and then I could spend an additional hour doing my job!!”

I hadn’t ever really thought about this until then. It seems like most companies just think “having an assistant or secretary is extravagance” so obviously they can’t afford it. But if they really knew what kind of unskilled grunt work highly-paid people spend so much time doing I think they would change their minds.

In my experience, so purely subjective, high-paid leaders/managers spend upwards of 90% of their time on things that do not justify the pay. The same was true for me. I can't tell you how often I felt simultaneously underpaid for the value I COULD bring, and radically overpaid for the work I was required to perform.

I completely agree with this. Not much more to add other than that, but you've put into words what I have been thinking of my own situation.

I've had this conversation with my various managers many times: "Oooookaaaay, if you really want to pay me my salary to spend my time filling out expense reports, copying status updates from one document to another, scheduling meetings for people, and all these other administrative tasks, then that's what I'll do. But, wow, what a waste."

People forget the plan recommended by Brooks in the Mythical Man Month. Surgical teams with delegated duties led by an experienced surgeon. Positions of a secretary, language lawyer, documentation writer, (and others I forget). I would love to just once work or lead such team.

Hallelujah! I felt this exactly when I was a director managing about 40 people. I would say at least half my day was taken up with logistics. The amount of actual mentorship and engineering leadership I did was less than the amount of time I had do to compared with a lot of bureaucratic responsibilities of my job.

At the time, there was an admin assistant who worked for our CTO, and she was fantastic - extremely detail oriented, organized and proactive. I kept thinking "All my training is in software engineering, and yet I'm doing all these tasks that she is much better at." Kept thinking that if my job was "split" down the middle that everyone would be much happier and my company would be getting a much better deal, with people's time largely spent on the stuff they are best at.

Whatever happened to secretaries anyway? Were they really cost-cut for managers to do by themselves?

You're right though, it's a valuable job being the glue of a business. In more than one way, not just work-wise. Social stuff matters too, and was often the domain of the secretaries.

Symptom of "MBAs eating the world". They got fired in the first layoff round, back around 1998.

Secretaries spent a lot of time typing, and therefore were considered to be typists. In the 1990s using a keyboard went from a subservient role (typist) to a prestigious role (computers are expensive!) and then achieved ubiquity.

If you look at things through the lens of social status signalling among primates, an awful lot becomes clear. Consider office arrangements. What primates like is having:

- a private space to retreat to, and

- a team/family shared space, and

- a tribal/company shared space that strangers can be invited to visit, often decorated to show off success/wealth.

Control is established by the leaders awarding better territories to themselves and favorite allies, and by removing private spaces for those of low status. The worst insult is to remove space ownership altogether for some low status people, making them "hot desk" or "hotel".

In theory, they were replaced by technology. Answering machine (later voicemail), word processor/grammar checkers, email calendars, etc.

Part of the problem is that some of the time this was supposed to free up was consumed by managing the tech itself.

A ton of that can be automated through your delivery system as well. Managers need to become flow engineers and get away from managing people.

I heard a similar sentiment from a high performing colleague from a company my employer partered with. He said something along the lines of "if they (client) wants me to make constant PowerPoint reports, they better pay extra for an intern in the contract because I am not wasting time on that".

Absolutely.

I have almost this exact conversation with folks all the time. The majority of managers are dead weight and often have a negative impact on performance and culture.

Leaders (natural or learned) are incredibly valuable.

Managers are overhead.

This already happened once, in the 80s. A massive reduction of the 'middle class', by eliminating massive amounts of middle management.

Managers aren't overhead, it's an absurd statement, because it's an absolute. Managers allow leaders to extend their reach. Absolutely no leader can scale beyond a certain point. At all.

Managers allow for that. They're essential, beyond a certain org size.

Now, I will agree that some should not be managers! But that is the same for any profession. You need to churn, to chop off those not performing, or poorly suited to the task.

In the context of this conversation, if AI can perform those management tasks (not leadership, but management), then I think it's only a matter of time before they will.

To be clear, I'm not saying this is a good thing. I just think it's inevitable. I'd probably consider it a good thing if it wasn't for the loss of all those middle-class jobs.

This is also why I recommend Marshall Brain's "Manna". He nailed it. AI isn't coming for entry-level jobs. Not right away. Because manual labour is actually incredibly complex to replicate with AI. But it's coming for the middle, whether we like it or not.

I say this as someone who has spent most of my career in middle management, for context.

Google spent many months and millions of dollars to prove the value of managers. They tried to get rid of them, then spent tons of effort to study and understand the problems that caused.

Ultimately for a company to succeed, people need to be aligned, and in an emotional space to do good work. That is very hard to automate. Google found they could not.

I think this again points to the difference between management and leadership. The emotional side of it -- the people side of it -- is leadership. It's coaching. It's understanding that everyone is an individual and has their own needs, as well as their own trauma and baggage. Leadership is knowing how to get everyone to work together towards a common cause. It requires empathy and compassion, as well as a strong understanding of the business.

I'm not saying AI could never do that, but the current generation of AI is nowhere near this capability. It'll take innovation beyond LLMs to get there.

AI could replace bad managers, of which there are too many, but not good ones. Can an AI provide a sense of connection to higher levels or other parts of the company? Not even possible. Can an AI motivate? Can it resolve conflict? Doubtful at best. I certainly wouldn't trust one with any of the more therapy-adjacent things that a good manager does, and that's a big part of the job if they're doing it right.

The problem with so much management - the reason the rest of us hate it - is that it's already too formulaic, too inhumane and empathy-free, too much of people as machines rather than as people. Replacing that with actual machines is not the solution. It's just more cost-cutting at the expense of workers.

(Yes, I realize OP was satire. The points on both sides still stand.)

When the headlines were “AI is going to cause a loss of tech jobs“ I heard “AI is going to manage my company (the part I don’t want to do) while I build the things that solve customer problems (the part I do want to do)”

To me, this sounds a lot like hero worship.

As an engineer for 40 years, I don't need to be led. I know what needs to be done.

I would say "leadship" is a highly emotional (on both sides) behaviour that would be perfectly fit by a solution based on historical statistical analysis.

I'd say there are most CEO's that probably could be replaced, assuming that CEO isn't also the founder, you can't replace the 'visionary leader' of a platform, or if the CEO is someone like Steve Jobs who I guess was sort of a founder of apple so that's kinda moot.

80% of CEO's could easily be replaced in a few years, then that can trickle down to other managers, and eventually lead towards more "flat" organizational hierachies which hopefully are more equitable and pay better for all employees, not just a rich few.

Rao's The Gervais Principle would argue that middle managers are essential.

His interpretation of them is that they act as the carbon control rods in the nuclear reaction of capitalism. Prior to their invention, we had workers and owners. And then we had a lot of strikes and worker solidarity and other nasty socialist things like that. Then we invented middle managers for all the workers to get mad at instead and shield the owners from all the ire and rock throwing.

Rao's interpretation is overtly tongue-in-cheek, but makes a good point. That middle managers aren't strictly there for productivity, but act also in an emotional/human-nature/psychological capacity.

those leaders come around so incredibly rarely, that movies get made about it!

True, but if you look at the top-performing companies, they tend to be driven by risk-taking, rule-breaking leaders.

That should be referenced in a paper about survivorship basics.

Has anyone in the history of capitalism ever identified themselves as "middle management"?

I think most people associate the term middle management with the guy immediately above them.

Honestly, a lot of this resembles the "If only the Tsar knew!" mentality in old, imperial Russia.

I identify as middle management, for what it's worth.

This isn't a vague term, it means people who manage managers, but who aren't the very top level. You'd have to be pretty delusional to be actively managing a group of managers/teams and not realize you are middle management.

Interesting... I always thought the term meant any manager who isn't at the absolute top. If that's the case, maybe I'm not middle management anymore.

You’re not alone, tons of people think the way you do. Any time the topic turns to “middle management” here on HN, there are developers complaining about their managers. But someone directly managing a dev team would not satisfy the definition above.

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