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Comment by tboyd47 | Hacker News Reader

In order to be effective, yes, they do.

If developers are left to work on whatever they want, they end up creating projects that either have no value to their parent company or have value but don't get sold to anybody. Developers need managers to redirect their efforts in the most profitable direction. The main issue is that bad managers have a strong negative impact and most managers on software projects are bad.

If you truly believe that managers provide no value, then wouldn't a manager replacement tool also provide no value?

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That is the biggest load of bullshit I've ever heard. What if your business focused managers fuck up and accidentally write some code? Then they can no longer understand how to work on valuable and sell-able projects? Managers destroy projects and companies and create worthless work all day every day.

So there would still be Directors and Sr. Managers who would outline their vision for the product/teams, which would be further mapped to UseCase scenarios or feature Stories by Product managers.

"The main issue is that bad managers have a strong negative impact and most managers on software projects are bad."

>> precisely this is the main motivation of my Ask, to see that if tooling could reduce (if not eliminate) bad team managers..so basically only Tech lead or Sr.Engineers (who code up to a verifiable percent) would be part of the Engineering team which in turn would be managed by an intelligent "VirtualTeamManager" tool and this tool would be tuned with inputs from Sr.Manager and Director (of that team).

Let me know your thoughts further..

What do you think a tool would be better at doing than a person?

This tool would not intentionally play politics or not be improved in short time (like bad behavior or ineffective manager) , and so the employees would trust it more than a bad manager.

Think of it like an "AI Manager", the tool could learn from various scenarios or data points across teams and bring some sort of management consistency.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

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