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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

What makes you think that’s true?

Tell ChatGPT it's a product manager overseeing engineers and providing executive summaries. Create a system that feeds executive emails inquiring about project statuses into ChatGPT and emails the developers asking for updates. Developers reply with jargon-heavy details about tickets for next milestone, ChatGPT writes an executive summary that eliminates jargon and sends to executives.

Not the full job, but it can probably be built right now.

And no emails are even necessary (it can scan all internal systems and repositories instead).

This is a project managers job not a engineering managers job.

OP said “product manager” which is also wrong. Funny how these three very different roles constantly get mixed up by smart engineers.

Maybe because from the POV of engineers, they all look kind of the same and half of it doesn't make sense.

The bad version of all three look exactly the same. And the bad version of all three are actually worse than nobody at all. Yet, high management is completely convinced those people are essential so they'd rather keep a bad professional there than get rid of them.

Anyway, the good version of those three are completely different, and add a ton of value on very different places. I think they are rare enough that many people don't ever meet one of them.

It would make things a lot easier if it was all one big AI. Lets refer to it as The company.

Titles--bloody titles! The AI doesn't care what its title is.

And unlike code, if the model fails it'll be more obvious and less costly.

Human managers (who are good at their jobs) bring a little Bedside Manner, a modicum of compassion to Human Resource Allocation that will soon be seen as a luxury compared to low-cost, fully-automated Human Resource Monitoring & Reinforcement Systems

Good managers shield their reports from a lot of the crap that is inevitable at scale in a large organization. A large company can't just have individuals and small self-managed teams go off and do whatever they feel like. And, yes, if you just cut out all the intermediate layers, the VP with 150 direct reports will simply have to resort to automation based on simplistic metrics. "You didn't produce enough lines of code last week. If that happens again, you will be placed on a performance plan and then terminated if the situation doesn't improve in 2 months."

Literally all of those layers including the VP could be replaced right now.

All those jobs do is push emails rewording other emails to other people pushing email.

I feel like eventually every company will have a single a figurehead that’s fed instructions but believes it’s original thought and is told by the AI what a great idea they just had all day long.

A bit like the Captain from Wall-E.

> A large company can't just have individuals and small self-managed teams go off and do whatever they feel like.

Right but how much of that is because humans don't scale? With the AI, if it can do a thing well enough it can do it 100 000 times per day.

I think its simply because upper management doesn't trust the people they've hired.

In my mind, having individuals and small self managed teams go off and do whatever they feel drawn to do is exactly how a good company is run. - So long as those teams and individuals talk to (& seek advice) from the rest of the company when their work has impacts outside the team. The book Reinventing Organizations by Laloux talks about this a lot, and how it works in some companies today.

The reason it doesn't happen more is that upper management doesn't trust their employees and they don't feel in control when people just do things.

”Repeat the task, with a more pleasant bedside manner.”

if GPT or copilot make developer 5-50x more productive then you need just 2 good programmers instead of team of 10-100 person, so out of window goes all formalized agile processes, safes etc so you don't need anymore those managers who are doing communicating, process planning and other big business stuff. Of course this will also affect for developers but I bet less because there is huge need for software developers and mid-size business did not have money to hire team huge team of developers but this will change when you need only two people instead of 40.

If C makes developers 5-50x more effective compared to writing assembly, then you just need two devs instead of a team of 10-100.

Obviously that didn't happen. And people actually made predictions like that once upon a time.

As software becomes cheaper, and the production of software can be done with fewer people, demand has always increased and I don't see any reason that's going to stop.

Reminds me of this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox but the situation with software is a bit different.

I recall seeing a video in which a senior vice president of Symbolics (yes, the Lisp machine people) claimed that their aim was to put the largest software projects within reach of a small team, and everything smaller would be feasible by a single person.

Had Lisp machines (as an idea) remained viable, we might've come close! But managers just love having large teams to command, and we've invented process and ceremony to fill up the spare time necessary to do the work of ten programmers with a hundred, as well as rejecting technologies like Lisp and Smalltalk that give individual programmers tremendous leverage over the problem space.

Should AI actually make people more productive, instead of being an endless generator of messes for fleshbags to clean up, I imagine some successor of Scrum to come along to tie up most of staff programmers' work days with meetings. Hell, that may happen anyway.

I don't disagree we just don't know yet. I do think these 2 guys will be overworked as f** and constantly context switching to the point they barely know what they're doing anymore...hope we don't get there.

Funny enough, last week I was talking about Copilot with a colleague. Out loud, I wondered if there was a diminishing return from Copilot. That is, Copilot is great at filling in boilerplate / the obvious, and I get to focus on the more intricate parts of the solution. But can my brain operate at the higher level day after day? Week after week? TBH I have my doubts.

Maybe it's going to be AI enables quality more than quantity?

Same thing is happening with doctors. I read a post from a GP a while back talking about how it used to be that he got a wide mix of acuity/difficulty all day long. Now all the "easy" patients go to the Nurse Practitioner, and all he gets is the difficult ones.

He's still expected to put in the same amount of time, but now he has to expend brain power the entire time.

Sounds like we're both making the case for the 4-Day work week.

There are a lot of tools that have made developers far more productive than that and it has never resulted in reduction of demand.

I learn in a different topic on HN that with a sophisticated chat bot lurkers dare ask support questions. As many developers I've often asked people how to do things. Before asking I try to find answers in google (as asking questions easily googled is lame) but if the chat channel is busy and I've already asked for help in the last 30 minutes I do more google searches. Each next question feels more expensive. Technically I apparently prefer to ask google first. If there is a chat bot fit for the question I should logically go "bother" that before asking humans for help.

Asking a human manager for anything is many orders of magnitude more frightening. It's not that I don't have questions! I have many, of which a lot are dumb questions, questions that I should be able to figure out without help.

Say i'm pondering taking a day off, with the human I would make up my mind, pick the day and ask for the day off. With a bot I would ask which day would be ideal before making up my mind. A human manager would think you've gone insane if you asked 20 such questions. You either want a day off, you don't or you say nothing.

I might like a different brand of coffee while we are trying to meet the deadline. I'm sure that question is going to go down well with an overworked human manager.

I don't think in 40-ish years I have ever asked a manager what's a good day or week for me to take off. I probably have certain constraints and I can look at my calendar. And have a general sense for good and less-good periods.

Purely out of curiosity I one time ask for a risk analysis report my employer is legally obligated to maintain and share with me (but didn't have). Safe to say the response involved a lot of emergent behavior.

With people asking a question is never just asking a question.

Like with any job there is a sub set of tasks better done by a machine.

There are questions that should be asked but wont be and ones that could be asked but shouldn't be. It depends a lot on the persons, their relationship and the context where the lines are but if its just a bot you can ask anything. The answers would somewhat depend on your role but they wont depend on who you are or how few or how many questions you've used up in the last hour, today, this week, this month and this year. Humans are like that, we are like: I've never asked for anything! as if its an important metric.

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