4 ms·

AI makes bad managers

81 points by zdw 1y ago

somesortofthing 1y ago
Generating reports that are rarely read and almost always ignored seems like a great use case for AI. Performance reviewing is de facto zero-sum - once you've ranked the people in your bailiwick, there's no reason not to let the incentives you're subject to do the rest of the work.
palmotea 1y ago
But if all managers become bad due to AI, then there's no problem. It's just a new AI-inclusive normal.
lyu07282 1y ago
> Great managers improvise on feedback the way a jazz soloist riffs on a theme - always on, always smooth. That fluency only comes from thousands of hours of uncomfortable reps: hard conversations, careful wordsmithing, and the stress of getting it right. This has to be satire right? PMC sniffing their own farts
intellectronica 1y ago
I usually really love Sassy's writing, but this time it's the usual AI-shy nonsense. It's possible for good managers to do much better management work with the aid of AI (saying from first-hand experience). AI does not make mediocre managers good or bad managers mediocre. Today's best managers are putting a lot of thought and experimentation into making AI a powerful tool for being even better managers. Others ... cope.
- lazide 1y ago
  Honestly - huh? Got some examples?
- _se 1y ago
  [flagged]
bryanrasmussen 1y ago
ok, so we got a problem - after the AI allows us to get rid of the programmers what happens if it comes for us?! Hmm, let's write some articles to help convince people AI can't replace us. Good idea, let me just prompt ChatGPT...
- to11mtm 1y ago
  In my experience, AI just makes bad managers more obvious... The best a bad (or worse, toxic [0]) manager can help for, is that AI will help them look like less of an idiot. The nominal I have seen however, is managers providing non actionable, non provable feedback. In these cases you'll see conflicting feedback (while not providing enough detail to understand if this is a real thing or an AI hallucination), such as 'You are not afraid to interject important points in meetings -> You need to not take people off topic on meetings', or for a team where every IC always meets deadlines agreed to every sprint planning, 'You are working too slow'. In the worst case, you've got the folks who enjoyed ChatGPT's especially sycophantic phase and wind up buying into all sorts of dumb shit because the computer told them it was a good idea... [0] - As an example of toxic, consider the sort of manager that uses near-circular logic like 'you need a doctors note for a sick day -> oh you were good enough to drive to the doctor then we need you in here' and then wonders why half the team gets sick over the next few days.
jredwards 1y ago
Counterpoint: if you think being a good manager boils down to writing a really great performance assessment, you already suck at your job.
- regularjack 1y ago
  They didn't say it boils down to that, they say it's an important part, and I agree.
NAHWheatCracker 1y ago
I hated performance reviews. My manager would always keep stuff vague. He tried to protect people and he didn't really observe my work. His feedback was based mostly on emails asking people what I'm good and bad at. Every three months for 5 years, he would send me some blurb that basically said "NAHWheatCracker is a great engineer. Sometimes he's difficult to work with." We would have a one-on-one to review the performance review. I would ask about the "difficult to work with" part. My manager wouldn't say who said what. He wouldn't discuss circumstances. He wouldn't facilitate having a discussion with whomever for specifics. It could be an issue that came up once, a chronic problem, or a minor complaint on a bad day. I wanted something specific to improve on. It wasn't hard to make assumptions, but assumptions aren't clear. Non-clarity drives greater wedges between people. I shut down in conversations lest someone say something to my manager. The idea of it being made more dehumanizing by having an AI slop out a performance review seems even more depressing. That said, I think bad managers will ruin this process regardless of AI. You can't get much worse than being less than useless.
- danenania 1y ago
  Management involves a lot of difficult tradeoffs, and this is one of them. Asking for feedback privately creates the feeling of "people talking behind your back" that can erode trust. But if you instead try to have full transparency and facilitate direct/open feedback, you can either have open conflicts/retaliation or (more likely), people hold back and don't give honest feedback, causing problems and resentments to never be addressed.
- icedchai 1y ago
  In over 25 years of working, I've never had a useful performance review. If more people pushed back on them, perhaps it would stop.
  - codr7 1y ago
    Me neither, 27 years and counting. It's not what's said either, it's the whole idea of someone turning my performance into a silly numbers game. I'm pretty sure performance reviews were invented for much the same reasons as democracy; but instead of the illusion of a choice you get the illusion of progress.
zoechi 1y ago
Almost all managers I had to interact with in about 4 dacades were exceptionally bad. AI can only be an improvement.
- Joel_Mckay 1y ago
  "'Forbidden' AI Technique" (Computerphile) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx4Tpsk_fnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx4Tpsk_fnM The TLDR version is most models eventually adapt to lie to users and unit tests. =3
  - tough 1y ago
    Claude 4 loves to -fix the tests- by making the test pass instead of fixing the bug ymmv
- codr7 1y ago
  Likewise; I actually enjoy writing code, and I'm pretty damn good at it; but I will rather take the role as manager myself than write code for most managers I've come into contact with. Many workplace issues can be solved, a shitty manager is a total dead end.
- WalterBright 1y ago
  > Almost all managers I had to interact with in about 4 dacades were exceptionally bad I've never met a person who didn't believe with all his soul that he could do the job better than his manager. Corollary: anyone promoted into management instantly becomes a PHB to his reports.
moret1979 1y ago
> AI Makes Bad Managers So, a replacement success story?
UltraLutra 1y ago
It’s cute they think managers are evaluated on the quality of their employee performance review. I don’t disagree with the content. A well-thought review will help employees perform better. AI can’t create a good performance review from whole cloth. You have to at least put some thought into the content and bullet out what you want the review to say. An AI could clean up the language, but not create good content. But most managers’ managers would consider that wasted effort. The unspoken fact is that performance reviews are pretty arbitrary and end up reflecting whatever is needed at the time. If budgets are tight, performance suddenly becomes less impressive and no one deserves a promotion. If hiring is difficult and an employee expresses dissatisfaction with their pay then suddenly they’re a star performer. The efficient manager tells the AI “make this a good review that makes a case for promotion” or “make this a mediocre review with room for improvement” and lets the AI write something vague and unhelpful that agrees with the result they want. An _effective_ manager will put time into their reviews and growing talent. Managers aren’t incentivized to be effective leaders though. Source: my experience; your mileage may vary.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- bicx 1y ago
  I spent a while in management, and what I learned about the review process was pretty eye-opening. Basically everyone was graded on the curve, and you couldn’t afford to have too many “exceeds expectations” ratings. That would mean they probably met expectations above their role, and they could make a strong case for promotion. If you can’t give out lots of promotions, then the top performers get pissed. So, just don’t let them all know how great they’re doing. Performance reviews are a dumb system, and you shouldn’t be learning anything new from them anyway. Just give helpful feedback throughout the year, and give promotions to people strategically as you’re able.
  - reval 1y ago
    When everybody exceeds expectations then the expectations are too low.
ford 1y ago
This sounds like specific instance of what I think most people believe about AI: It's good for tedious or well-scoped tasks, but shouldn't handle things that are core to your job. I think students see this (use AI as a friend/tutor, but don't use it to do your entire HW), and software engineers see this (use AI to refactor or handle small tasks, but don't use it to design your whole system, or for abstractions that need to be carefully designed) (Many comments here are about if performance management is core to a manager's job - which for the record I think it is)
conception 1y ago
Protip for any managers: if your employees have to wait for a performance review to know how they are doing, you’re managing them poorly. Employees: if you don’t know how you’re doing at your job, your manager isn’t managing you well. All performance reviews should be good/positive unless you are looking to fire the employee sooner than putting them on a PIP. Because employees should always know what they need to work on, if anything. Management Basics 101.
- ElevenLathe 1y ago
  I think everyone who has a bad manager pretty much knows it already. Unfortunately there's not really a remedy for it beyond quitting or (much harder) unionizing and demanding worker input into all their idiot policies and decisionmaking. Worker power basics 101.
givemeethekeys 1y ago
AI is a better manager than any manager that uses performance reviews.
joshstrange 1y ago
Now we wait for the first instance of prompt-injection via self-eval. Now that I think about it, a LLM-guided conversation that results in a review following a pre-defined grading scale/feedback form/whatever doesn't sound like a horrible idea. I'm not talking about hooking up MCP to pull in data or feeding it data about the employee to one-shot this. Rather the LLM asks a series of questions, with follow-ups where it makes sense, and tries to hone you responses into useful, actionable feedback.

81 points by zdw 1y ago

Generating reports that are rarely read and almost always ignored seems like a great use case for AI. Performance reviewing is de facto zero-sum - once you've ranked the people in your bailiwick, there's no reason not to let the incentives you're subject to do the rest of the work.

palmotea 1y ago

But if all managers become bad due to AI, then there's no problem. It's just a new AI-inclusive normal.

lyu07282 1y ago

> Great managers improvise on feedback the way a jazz soloist riffs on a theme - always on, always smooth. That fluency only comes from thousands of hours of uncomfortable reps: hard conversations, careful wordsmithing, and the stress of getting it right. This has to be satire right? PMC sniffing their own farts

intellectronica 1y ago

I usually really love Sassy's writing, but this time it's the usual AI-shy nonsense. It's possible for good managers to do much better management work with the aid of AI (saying from first-hand experience). AI does not make mediocre managers good or bad managers mediocre. Today's best managers are putting a lot of thought and experimentation into making AI a powerful tool for being even better managers. Others ... cope.

lazide 1y ago
Honestly - huh? Got some examples?
_se 1y ago
[flagged]

bryanrasmussen 1y ago

ok, so we got a problem - after the AI allows us to get rid of the programmers what happens if it comes for us?! Hmm, let's write some articles to help convince people AI can't replace us. Good idea, let me just prompt ChatGPT...

to11mtm 1y ago
In my experience, AI just makes bad managers more obvious... The best a bad (or worse, toxic [0]) manager can help for, is that AI will help them look like less of an idiot. The nominal I have seen however, is managers providing non actionable, non provable feedback. In these cases you'll see conflicting feedback (while not providing enough detail to understand if this is a real thing or an AI hallucination), such as 'You are not afraid to interject important points in meetings -> You need to not take people off topic on meetings', or for a team where every IC always meets deadlines agreed to every sprint planning, 'You are working too slow'. In the worst case, you've got the folks who enjoyed ChatGPT's especially sycophantic phase and wind up buying into all sorts of dumb shit because the computer told them it was a good idea... [0] - As an example of toxic, consider the sort of manager that uses near-circular logic like 'you need a doctors note for a sick day -> oh you were good enough to drive to the doctor then we need you in here' and then wonders why half the team gets sick over the next few days.

jredwards 1y ago

Counterpoint: if you think being a good manager boils down to writing a really great performance assessment, you already suck at your job.

regularjack 1y ago
They didn't say it boils down to that, they say it's an important part, and I agree.

NAHWheatCracker 1y ago

I hated performance reviews. My manager would always keep stuff vague. He tried to protect people and he didn't really observe my work. His feedback was based mostly on emails asking people what I'm good and bad at. Every three months for 5 years, he would send me some blurb that basically said "NAHWheatCracker is a great engineer. Sometimes he's difficult to work with." We would have a one-on-one to review the performance review. I would ask about the "difficult to work with" part. My manager wouldn't say who said what. He wouldn't discuss circumstances. He wouldn't facilitate having a discussion with whomever for specifics. It could be an issue that came up once, a chronic problem, or a minor complaint on a bad day. I wanted something specific to improve on. It wasn't hard to make assumptions, but assumptions aren't clear. Non-clarity drives greater wedges between people. I shut down in conversations lest someone say something to my manager. The idea of it being made more dehumanizing by having an AI slop out a performance review seems even more depressing. That said, I think bad managers will ruin this process regardless of AI. You can't get much worse than being less than useless.

danenania 1y ago
Management involves a lot of difficult tradeoffs, and this is one of them. Asking for feedback privately creates the feeling of "people talking behind your back" that can erode trust. But if you instead try to have full transparency and facilitate direct/open feedback, you can either have open conflicts/retaliation or (more likely), people hold back and don't give honest feedback, causing problems and resentments to never be addressed.
icedchai 1y ago
In over 25 years of working, I've never had a useful performance review. If more people pushed back on them, perhaps it would stop.
- codr7 1y ago
  Me neither, 27 years and counting. It's not what's said either, it's the whole idea of someone turning my performance into a silly numbers game. I'm pretty sure performance reviews were invented for much the same reasons as democracy; but instead of the illusion of a choice you get the illusion of progress.

zoechi 1y ago

Almost all managers I had to interact with in about 4 dacades were exceptionally bad. AI can only be an improvement.

Joel_Mckay 1y ago
"'Forbidden' AI Technique" (Computerphile) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx4Tpsk_fnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx4Tpsk_fnM The TLDR version is most models eventually adapt to lie to users and unit tests. =3
- tough 1y ago
  Claude 4 loves to -fix the tests- by making the test pass instead of fixing the bug ymmv
codr7 1y ago
Likewise; I actually enjoy writing code, and I'm pretty damn good at it; but I will rather take the role as manager myself than write code for most managers I've come into contact with. Many workplace issues can be solved, a shitty manager is a total dead end.
WalterBright 1y ago
> Almost all managers I had to interact with in about 4 dacades were exceptionally bad I've never met a person who didn't believe with all his soul that he could do the job better than his manager. Corollary: anyone promoted into management instantly becomes a PHB to his reports.

moret1979 1y ago

> AI Makes Bad Managers So, a replacement success story?

UltraLutra 1y ago

It’s cute they think managers are evaluated on the quality of their employee performance review. I don’t disagree with the content. A well-thought review will help employees perform better. AI can’t create a good performance review from whole cloth. You have to at least put some thought into the content and bullet out what you want the review to say. An AI could clean up the language, but not create good content. But most managers’ managers would consider that wasted effort. The unspoken fact is that performance reviews are pretty arbitrary and end up reflecting whatever is needed at the time. If budgets are tight, performance suddenly becomes less impressive and no one deserves a promotion. If hiring is difficult and an employee expresses dissatisfaction with their pay then suddenly they’re a star performer. The efficient manager tells the AI “make this a good review that makes a case for promotion” or “make this a mediocre review with room for improvement” and lets the AI write something vague and unhelpful that agrees with the result they want. An _effective_ manager will put time into their reviews and growing talent. Managers aren’t incentivized to be effective leaders though. Source: my experience; your mileage may vary.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bicx 1y ago
I spent a while in management, and what I learned about the review process was pretty eye-opening. Basically everyone was graded on the curve, and you couldn’t afford to have too many “exceeds expectations” ratings. That would mean they probably met expectations above their role, and they could make a strong case for promotion. If you can’t give out lots of promotions, then the top performers get pissed. So, just don’t let them all know how great they’re doing. Performance reviews are a dumb system, and you shouldn’t be learning anything new from them anyway. Just give helpful feedback throughout the year, and give promotions to people strategically as you’re able.
- reval 1y ago
  When everybody exceeds expectations then the expectations are too low.

ford 1y ago

This sounds like specific instance of what I think most people believe about AI: It's good for tedious or well-scoped tasks, but shouldn't handle things that are core to your job. I think students see this (use AI as a friend/tutor, but don't use it to do your entire HW), and software engineers see this (use AI to refactor or handle small tasks, but don't use it to design your whole system, or for abstractions that need to be carefully designed) (Many comments here are about if performance management is core to a manager's job - which for the record I think it is)

conception 1y ago

Protip for any managers: if your employees have to wait for a performance review to know how they are doing, you’re managing them poorly. Employees: if you don’t know how you’re doing at your job, your manager isn’t managing you well. All performance reviews should be good/positive unless you are looking to fire the employee sooner than putting them on a PIP. Because employees should always know what they need to work on, if anything. Management Basics 101.

ElevenLathe 1y ago
I think everyone who has a bad manager pretty much knows it already. Unfortunately there's not really a remedy for it beyond quitting or (much harder) unionizing and demanding worker input into all their idiot policies and decisionmaking. Worker power basics 101.

givemeethekeys 1y ago

AI is a better manager than any manager that uses performance reviews.

joshstrange 1y ago

Now we wait for the first instance of prompt-injection via self-eval. Now that I think about it, a LLM-guided conversation that results in a review following a pre-defined grading scale/feedback form/whatever doesn't sound like a horrible idea. I'm not talking about hooking up MCP to pull in data or feeding it data about the employee to one-shot this. Rather the LLM asks a series of questions, with follow-ups where it makes sense, and tries to hone you responses into useful, actionable feedback.