I think it funny how much average engineers are beginning to discover the challenges of engineering leadership and program management. This has always been the bottleneck.

It's why managers and PMs want to be in standup. It's why slack exists and engineers are constantly being poked on it. It's why execs always talk about not getting too far away from the work. It's how seagull management happens. It's why program management is a job.

All those behaviors engineers hated about their bosses that kept them away from being focused on the code...they're starting to feel what it's like on the other side and reinventing the solutions instead of just reading a book about engineering management. Maybe we'll rebrand program management to "understanding ops" or something.

I wonder what AI would say about us if given the tokens to complain.

> I think it funny how much average engineers are beginning to discover the challenges of engineering leadership and program management. This has always been the bottleneck.

It is somewhat new for most ICs to need this skillset, as opposed to tech leads/staff folks. What books would you suggest for this new reality?

I remember when I raised this point like a year or two ago -- in response to someone saying that coding AI made all their work trivial I said something like "if you have multiple agents the work changes and becomes more managerial - don't you think that managers contribute value" and I got a bunch of downvotes and all the responses were like "no manager has ever contributed value." Ahh, good times.

> It's why managers and PMs want to be in standup.

While I agree at face value, I also believe a lot of managers and PMs do not have enough work to justify 40 or more hours of work a week, so attending standup, meetings, etc. is performative attempt at self-preservation.

Of course, there are many managers and PMs that are leading death marches, so I know it's highly workplace dependent.

cant wait till the AI starts saying "dont ask me". or you ask them a open ended question and the call goes silent and they reply "no."

I've worked with many engineers who used this knowledge gap to lie and manipulate whether its an engineer lying to their PM or a cto lying to their non tech cofounder. Atleast if you ask AI for a description it won't lie intentionally, unless it was trained on an engineer and picked up the pattern. I do blame the victims though for not being able to detect a lier or act on it once they do

All this pushback against AI is starting to look like a corrupt engineer no longer being able to lie about what they're doing. It happens in every corrupt group pushing against new tech or change