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Comment by techjamie | Hacker News Reader

The ironic part really is that the average middle management job is probably among the more simple jobs you can automate away with AI at scale. Tell it your metrics, your targets, and other relevant info, and it can feed directions down to employees at scale.

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I don't buy this at all. There's significantly more to management than tracking and hitting metrics. You have to actually do the hard part of interacting with people and understanding their needs and so on within the context of work.

I'm sorry, but vomiting up another bulleted list is NOT management. Its giving orders and then culling the % that don't comply. Wildly different things.

> You have to actually do the hard part of interacting with people and understanding their needs and so on within the context of work.

Which is why it’s surprising that management is salivating at the idea of replacing employees and expecting 1 employee to do the work of 10 with the help of AI agents. If the value you bring is to manage people, you shouldn’t be happy at the idea of fewer people having jobs.

Management is salivating because their jobs are hard to automate, so they stand to benefit from not having to pay employees as much.

Again, what exactly are their jobs? You can’t automate them but you won’t need them either. If an org shrinks from 1000 engineers to 500 or worse, do you really keep those managers/directors/VPs around?

> You have to actually do the hard part of interacting with people and understanding their needs and so on within the context of work.

How many human managers actually do that, though? How many websites performed satisfactorily before AI arrived? How well has technology matched what consumers really need or want? Maybe, as a society we have underperformed and nescient AI performs well enough (or even better) in comparison.

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