Look at Musk. He's CEO of six companies (or so), yet has time to run DOGE and constantly post on X.

The real concern should be that telling entry level workers they need to be prompt engineering experts on top of everything else is stupid. We're only making it harder to hire the right people.

We should be focusing on whether someone can get the job done regardless of what strategies they prefer to research a solution.

You need a lot fewer managers if your team is 5-20% what it needed to be a few years ago.

Nobody would have believed it 10 years ago, but today AI is more likely to replace a concept artist than an accountant, so it's not beyond imagination to replace a manager even if the ICs are still human.

AI excels at summarization, which is a big part of the job for a lot of managers. They gather information, go to meetings, write reports, and generally re-share information appropriate for whatever audience.

At a lot of companies, the lowest level managers don't make a lot of decisions either. Tech leads make technical decisions, PMs make product decisions, and the skip-levels (e.g. Directors, VPs) make staffing decisions.

In practice, I don't think humans will report to AIs, but hierarchies might flatten (e.g. ICs report to Directors) and responsibilities might get shuffled around (e.g. some duties get assigned to HR).

If the workers are AI-bots, then I don't really see any skill overlap with management. If you manage only AIs, you are an IC, not management.

I think the real question is how do we best harness the increased productivity? Logically speaking, if each person is 5x as productive because of AI there should be an equally greater capacity to get things done. Businesses aren’t just running out of work to do, right?

So the type of management will be a big factor

Buy before Al replaces "managers," companies will (or should) rethink how their systems and workflows operate, then realign roles to match.

Instead of starting with a question of replacing roles (and some certainly will), it'll start with redefining how work gets done, and updating job descriptions accordingly.

What won't change is that employers will hire for value. So maybe while some companies would rather substitute managers with AI, I imagine many would prefer the outsized value an ai-literate manager might have

You will see this magnified by this year's Google I/O announcements.

Anytime they mention "AGI", it really is the goal of AI replacing humans from their jobs that are economically useful. (Not the benefit of humanity bullshit.)

In 10 - 15 years time, the questions from those who got out of tech would be:

Did you that humans used to program computers?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42490692

The exact same thing applies if you are a manager, do you really want a flock of loyal electric sheep to do your bidding? If you’re in management for control over others, how is that satisfying? If you’re in it to mentor, who comes after you? How?

Why does anyone want this? Our societies are already so mechanized and automated yet somehow we have less time than the average medieval peasant to enjoy our allegedly easier lives. What toil has been eliminated thus far?

Nobody really wants to decrease the number of humans in their fiefdom, right?

However, if AI actually works out and produces tools that make people, like, 5x more effective, than a software company can replace an existing one at 1/5 the cost with 1/5 the engineers. Fewer people to manage, less deep corporate tree, and maybe some of those middle layers will also use AI…

But nobody wants to decrease the size of their fiefdom, so that company will need to be built from the ground up and then wipe out the competition.

However I think an AI would maybe be more honest, about how well I do and my super high skill level perhaps, and not simply reject people for being over 50, White, Male, Overqualified, and good looking, as is [or dare I say was] the custom with DEI hiring practices, for the last decade...or two.

Also there's tons of science validating how the most unqualified and unfit people make it to leadership positions. If you're a leader, most likely you're not a good one. So it's not like the industry knows a good leader when they see it. So if AI is a better manager, the industry doesn't care. It's politics and ass kissing that gets them up there.

Just now I'm recirculating for the 2nd time a quote for a laptop that admin sent back to me because it had a tiny detail wrong, and then by the time I did the 2nd submission the quote expired. And this is about 1% of the beauracracy to get a new employee started in my org.

Performance Management - Biased or inconsistent performance reviews. - Goal-setting lacks clarity or alignment with org OKRs. - Lack of real-time performance insights.

Project Planning and Execution - Estimations are often inaccurate. - Project scope creep due to unclear requirements. - Dependencies across teams delay execution.

Technical Debt and Code Quality - Mounting technical debt slows velocity. - Inconsistent coding standards. - Hard to trace ownership for legacy code.

Team Collaboration and Communication - Cross-team communication breakdowns. - Time zones complicate decision-making. - Meeting overload or lack of clarity post-meeting.

Onboarding and Knowledge Transfer - New hires take too long to ramp up. - Tribal knowledge isn't well documented. - Onboarding processes are inconsistent.

Incident Management and Reliability - Blameless postmortems are rarely actionable. - Alert fatigue from noisy signals. - Root cause analysis (RCA) is time-consuming.

Career Growth and Mentorship - Lack of clarity in career ladders. - Mentorship is ad-hoc and inconsistent. - Managers don’t have enough time for coaching.

Engineering Productivity Metrics - Metrics often feel punitive or misused. - Hard to attribute impact to engineers’ work. - Lack of actionable insights from engineering data.

Cross-Functional Alignment - Product and engineering priorities are misaligned. - Specs often change mid-cycle. - Lack of visibility into roadmap tradeoffs.

Each of these categories will probably need an AI agent in itself and probably an AI agent to control all the other AI agents. It would be a complex system, but will still need some monitoring until it is self-sustaining.

Middle managers - when the line managers are gone

Senior leadership - when the middle management is gone (IF they are willing to give up their seats)

as always: imho. ...

idk. ... what do you mean by "managers" in your question!?

in my view: the "real" task of mangers - regardless of the level, but even more if they are at a lower/mid level - is managing peoples & their expectations - either of their "team" or their superior.

and looking at the current state of "AI", i don't see much gain in using it to manage those part of "management".

but i think (current) "AI" would be a good source of "additional" decision/reasoning over the lets call it "technical parts" of mgmt ...

sure, this will change in the future, but currently i don't see much on the horizon regarding the "peoples" part of mgmt.

but in the medium/long term, i could imagine a development somewhat similar to the following:

looking at the progression of neo-liberal capitalism: using / blaming AI for unfavorable (mgmt)decisions may be a good possibility to "hide" behind said AI to enforce such "unpopular" decision.

they would have been made anyways, but using this pattern "nobody" is responsible for such developments, because "AI said so" etc...

just my 0.02€

This is a weird question. If the team below a manager is replaced by AI, then quite obviously there is nothing else to manage. The real question is: can AI replace the teams?

Then of course, if there is a reduction in workforce, there may be a reduction of the number of teams and hence of the number of managers for those teams.

> competent prompt engineers

Writing prompts is not engineering.

We fired ~1/3rd of the managers last month. We had a (poor) town hall about it with platitudes galore. I talked to my new boss (was a skip level boss before) and they were unconcerned, as we'd 'brought in a new vendor' to 'assist in the transition'. I've never heard of bringing in a single vendor to help after manager layoffs. Since I do AI stuff in the company, the remaining managers have been keen to talk with be about AI now and how to use it better. I'm not sure what is really happening (I think it's just internal politics mostly) but there is a >20% chance they're doing something this stupid.

Wish me luck, y'all.

Too many edge cases. Managers are working with people and we are complicated.

Will the AI Manager fight correctly about my promotion or my bonus? Will it make sure I have a good work-life balance? Will it considered I did an extraordinary job vs an underperforming job?