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Comment by pizzly | Hacker News Reader

Cognitive Debt has existed much earlier before LLMs became mainstream. Technical people got good at their jobs and then was promoted to management. After time they lost their technical abilities but if they are a good manager they kept up to date with the technological landscape and used their engineering thinking to ensure that the people below them worked to their optimum efficiency to achieve the companies goals.

Now we all know horrible mangers who didn't keep up to date nor used their thinking. This will happen with AI useage too. What is more we are expecting people who are engineers to have a manager's mindset (by managing AI agents, products requirements, etc). Many engineers are horrible at this and have no desires or ability to become a manager. This is why they went to engineering in the first place.

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>Many engineers are horrible at this and have no desires or ability to become a manager. This is why they went to engineering in the first place.

Bingo. If I wanted to spend my life managing incompetent sycophants, I would've studied for an MBA to try to rise the ranks at McKinsey.

While this isn't a unique perspective, I think it's wild more people don't understand this. What happened is everyone is being "promoted" to staff+ level engineer and they're realizing the realities of that situation.

The funny part is that these are the same people who are upset that these folks up the food chain "do nothing".

They're being "promoted" without any kind of extra income, only elevated expectations and responsibilities

So no wonder people aren't happy

If you’re a manager you have people under you that care about the code they write and the direction of the company, not typewriter monkeys.

Not my experience, most people are mercenaries, most people make mistakes, most people need their code and architecture reviewed. Obviously working with a person and working with an AI are not identical, but most of the broad responsibilities are the same.

And it's much more like senior IC than it is manager.

This is true; as smarter people than me have said, software engineering is programming over time, and that time aspect involves individuals knowing less and less of a codebase. But that's what these smart people are advocating, in order to keep code maintainable, you need to stick to some rules, processes, patterns, etc.

Whether you apply those things to other developers or LLMs is a bit moot I think, ultimately neither (or you yourself) can be fully trusted to know and understand the full system.

This, and I would even say we are promoting people to be kings and queens. I'm afraid AI will amplify our worst parts because they are ultimately sycophants. I've heard so many things about AI enabling a single person to run a billion dollar business. But I believe without the right mindset/discipline, a person cannot go too far with any technology.

I'm consistently surprised by how many "software engineers" I've worked with have never read Naur's paper (https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf) or not even familiar with this notion before agentic coding. This was always a reality in our discipline whether folks realized it or now.

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