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A managers job, before anything else, is marketing. Marketing to employees that they are contributing. Marketing to employees that the promotions they got are

A managers job, before anything else, is marketing. Marketing to employees that they are contributing. Marketing to employees that the promotions they got are good, marketing to employees that the promotions they didn't get aren't because they didn't contribute greatly. Marketing to people above that their employees deserve promotion. Marketing to people above that they need more resources/headcount. Marketing to other teams that the priority that rewards them most isn't as important as what rewards your team the most. Marketing to new hires that it's a great place to work. Marketing to employees that could leave that it's a great place to stay. Marketing that the companies vision is great. Marketing that what the employee wants to work on isn't as important as the promises the team made. Managers are salesmen. I don't think software is going to replace that any time soon.

Jensson 4y ago
No, that isn't their job, that is what they do but it isn't their job. The owners would gladly replace lying managers who fudge numbers with an AI that never betrays them and communicates problems accurately. If you just replace one manager you get the issues you enumerated, but if you replace all managers with AI then all of that just disappears and the AI just has to prioritize and make decisions according to the will of upper management. This would replace most middle managers, so no more need for shitty corporate politics.
- hayst4ck 4y ago
  Managers that fudge numbers are a result of pressure from the people over them. The owner is ultimately responsible for creating a system of incentives where lies are preferable to the truth. See: Russia's Putin Thinking that something is easy because it can be stated easily, is the most standard of engineering errors. "let's go to the moon." Simple idea, 400,000+ people to implement. Replace all the managers with AI is similarly a simple idea for which it is easy to think of how it might work, but much harder to think about all the ways it wouldn't and the incredible complexity of doing so. AI isn't just a black box that complexity goes in and the result you want comes out. Figuring out the result you want is an incredibly complex thing to think about alone. I think you think being a manager is both more mechanical and less skilled than it is. That's before even thinking about how dystopian mental laborours plugged into an AI management matrix like system optimizing for "high output" is. You think an owner is going to optimize for well being, or do you think the standard owner would prefer to burn out employees and get a new ones when the current ones are exhausted? Extreme ownership is a very good book. I think you would get a lot out of reading it.

Jensson 4y ago

No, that isn't their job, that is what they do but it isn't their job. The owners would gladly replace lying managers who fudge numbers with an AI that never betrays them and communicates problems accurately. If you just replace one manager you get the issues you enumerated, but if you replace all managers with AI then all of that just disappears and the AI just has to prioritize and make decisions according to the will of upper management. This would replace most middle managers, so no more need for shitty corporate politics.

hayst4ck 4y ago
Managers that fudge numbers are a result of pressure from the people over them. The owner is ultimately responsible for creating a system of incentives where lies are preferable to the truth. See: Russia's Putin Thinking that something is easy because it can be stated easily, is the most standard of engineering errors. "let's go to the moon." Simple idea, 400,000+ people to implement. Replace all the managers with AI is similarly a simple idea for which it is easy to think of how it might work, but much harder to think about all the ways it wouldn't and the incredible complexity of doing so. AI isn't just a black box that complexity goes in and the result you want comes out. Figuring out the result you want is an incredibly complex thing to think about alone. I think you think being a manager is both more mechanical and less skilled than it is. That's before even thinking about how dystopian mental laborours plugged into an AI management matrix like system optimizing for "high output" is. You think an owner is going to optimize for well being, or do you think the standard owner would prefer to burn out employees and get a new ones when the current ones are exhausted? Extreme ownership is a very good book. I think you would get a lot out of reading it.