AI shifts managers from directing work to enabling it

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 12:29

   thing yeah i think it's i think it's more like for me it feels like people management whenever i use claude i'm like if i give it a really really robust prompt that is very clear with sort of the goals and like the nuances of the goals then i get a good response but i think i think i i personally feel like there's a lot of transferable skills i've been in this industry for a while but i also think i'm discovering more and more that um how you see yourself and sort of the identity that you took on in your career in tech plays a big role in how people feel about it I'm an engineering manager right like I'm an engineering manager who's always built a lot of products so I feel like I'm sort of in both worlds and if I can if I can maybe be a little harsh to all my fellow engineering managers I think there's a lot of engineering managers out there who

2. 13:19

   perceive their job to be to tell their direct reports how to do their job yeah and I think what we're discovering now is that as everyone gets dramatically more productive that that doesn't actually scale and it's not super useful and also not that helpful anymore whereas helping people with like communication and learning the right opportunities sort of like facilitating that all of the productivity that is suddenly happening is going roughly in the right direction I think that is actually becoming more necessary and it's like amplified in need yeah so just for managers I can sort of see these two parts of like oh if you operated this way you probably do have to like accept that you yelling at people about when things need to be done and how they need to make their PRs it's not that useful anymore and I would maybe position I'm not sure that it was ever all that

3. 14:06

   useful to be totally honest and then for engineers too I think there's a lot of value in being able to there's like different theories on what makes a good software engineer right but like I think one of the more common accepted ones is that you can take whatever like a person is asking for turn that into technical requirements and then execute on them yeah and especially founders I think have always been very good at that right like talking to people figuring out what do they really want how to build a product around that I think that skill super transferable very useful in my own hiring probably the thing I look for the most it's like this empathy yeah yeah yeah that's an interesting way to think about it and but there's probably also the flip side of like what is less transferable right and it's

4. 14:53

   like but again things that maybe i would i i didn't think of that highly in the past either which is there's like a subsection of tech that always really love to debate spaces versus tabs oh interesting yeah and i'm not sure that that ever translated into like better products yeah and i think now it's just like straight up useless but was it ever all that useful oh, I'm not sure, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah.