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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
by madrox 2mo ago
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.
- calvinmorrison 2mo agocant 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."
- notnaut 2mo agoThat would be a massive improvement. “I don’t know, maybe these other smarter more expensive models with more recent training data might… here are some questions you could ask them:…”
- kazinator 2mo agoSimply those first three words out of an LLM would be a massive improvement: "I don't know". "I am not sure". "My confidence in the following answer is low due to a lack of reliable information in my training and online sources ..."
- simianwords 2mo agoYou do know it can already do that?
- epistasis 2mo agoUntil an AI does that, it won't be able to pass a Turing test.
- intrasight 2mo agoSo many people I know believe that AI has already passed the Turing test. What's weird is that a lot of them are managers and should understand that never getting an "I don't know" means something ain't right.
- throwaway27448 2mo agoThere is no single or standard turing test. You could say it's been continually passing more of them over the decades. These days, I find it difficult to believe there's a human who couldn't be fooled with the right prompt.
- Izkata 2mo agoI remember reading a news article over a decade ago (maybe even two) about people testing their bots on dating sites and how they have to occasionally break the hearts of people who fell for their bot.
- inigyou 2mo agoELIZA passed the Turing test.
- intrasight 2mo agoI agree and disagree. When I run the Turing test, it's me testing the computer. I don't care if anyone else isn't able to discriminate. Of course there is no "standard Turing test" as that would imply that it's an some kind of bot testing another AI and obviously that fraud with issues. The Turing test is a human testing the computer and that human is me.
- Shorel 2mo agoBecause managers themselves can't pass the test xD
- derangedHorse 2mo agoIf you haven't gotten a refusal from AI yet to answer a question, I guess you haven't annoyed it enough. Claude very much threatens to stop conversing on re-hashed topics with repeated arguments within a thread lol.
- ls-a 2mo ago[flagged]
- 8note 2mo agodepends on whats in the text of the code. the llm wont lie, but it also wont tell the truth
- losteric 2mo ago> 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?
- johnfn 2mo agoI 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.
- iwontberude 2mo ago[dead]
- leptons 2mo ago"Managers" don't contribute much if any value. Someone with creative vision contributes value. That cam be a PM, or the right engineer, and sometimes both if you're lucky. Most of us aren't lucky like that.
- trial3 2mo agoi can’t believe you’re True Scotsmaning all of the people who you have reported to
- i_am_a_peasant 2mo agoAs an engineer I've found most managers that i ever worked with to be perfectly fine people and their role was justified and I was happy that their job was not my job. By most I mean maybe 75%
- ls-a 2mo ago[flagged]
- iwontberude 2mo ago[dead]
- ls-a 2mo agoYes corrupt engineer. Why do you think most countries have corrupt leaders? It's not a coincidence. You get what you deserve. Most people are corrupt.
- cindyllm 2mo ago[dead]
- hirvi74 2mo ago> 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.
- sharts 2mo agoThe best managers make it such that underlings don’t need to go to BS meetings and keep others from interrupting you with inane nonsense.
- 361994752 2mo agoI’ve worked on both sides, so I know they’re actually very different. As a manager, the first thing you do is get to know your people. Some of them will be very strong and trustworthy. You give them the hardest work, and you ask them the least. That’s how you scale your team’s scope without getting overburdened. And that’s why teams have key people. But when you work with LLMs, you still need to understand most of the ideas yourself if it’s a serious product. Because in the end, it means nothing to “trust” an agent. You’re the one responsible for what you and the LLM ship.
- bmurphy1976 2mo agoThis doesn't change the fact that those soft skills are necessary to use LLMs effectively. You need a mixture of hard and soft skills. Engineers who have avoided learning the soft skills are going to have a harder time adjusting.
- Terr_ 2mo ago> those soft skills They may be softer, but they're really not an identical set of soft-skills. To illustrate the difference, imagine: "Hey, you've got all those soft-skills from tweaking the AI stuff, right? I need you to motivate Bob to get his head back in the game, but without causing him to resign."
- galaxyLogic 2mo agoBut if you are managing AI agents you dont' need "soft skills" do you? You don't need to be especially nice to the AI, or symphatize with it, or have fun with it to build trust, I would imagine that managing a team of AI-agents is totally different from managing a team of people.
- chasd00 2mo ago> But if you are managing AI agents you dont' need "soft skills" do you? “Soft skills” in management just means figuring out how to get what you want from the people you have available to you. In that respect those skills translate to using an LLM.
- _ink_ 2mo agoWhat book would you recommend?
- mindwok 2mo agoAren't you just taking the same dismissive attitude towards management and doing it to engineers?
- rnd33 2mo agoMaybe, or maybe you are overly pattern matching on what you what to be true? I don't think anyone would mind having a competent manager or PM in a standup, someone that is actually contributing towards finding solutions and ways to move forward.
- i_am_a_peasant 2mo agoyeah, I would say half of the program managers I ever interacted with had their role justified, the other half would be let go during the next layoff....along with at least half the competent ones..
- crabbone 2mo agoI have some experience as a manager, but not a lot (something short of a two years in the same company). I dislike the idea of standups both as a programmer and as a manager. They remind me too much of military drills: something performative, useless, only to keep new recruits busy. The reason I think that is because it puts communication into a very simplified and regimented framework, so simple and unable to adequately answer the needs of the communicating parties that nobody actually uses it for the intended purpose. The actual communication happens between people who actually need to work on something, in the format that allows more freedom, with more aids, more prep time, perhaps over multiple sessions. Sometimes, probably, as a manager, you have to work with a very low quality workforce, lacking motivation and simply avoiding doing any useful work as much as possible (eg. some overseas outsourced project that gets paid by an hour). In this case, standups become a soft punishment tool: something to verify that workers showed up to work, that they didn't lie about the progress made so far etc. You would still have to do the former part of the management, but now you also have this kindergarten-teacher style chore on top of it.
- js8 2mo agoActually, project managers could learn a lot from computer science. For example, on scheduling - kanban is the way to go (that's what OS is doing), scrum is BS. Or on planning - planning has a cost which decreases the total throughput. There is also a variation of Amdahl's law - if you automate more things, the predictability of remaining work will decrease, because it will now take more time. Also, formal languages still trump natural language. Despite LLMs; I think it's a stepping stone to something better but "vibe coding" will turn out to be unsustainable.
- another-dave 2mo agoTo me, the biggest hurdle to trying to manage agents like humans is that there's no real continuity, out of the box at least. You can trying to get around this with RAG and markdown files and skills but you're basically building from scratch the "tools" on how to remember the codebase that you take for granted with people
- theshrike79 2mo agoThere's no continuity with outsourced consultants either. But still people manage to make it work. With the exact same tools you use with LLMs: proper documentation and detailed instructions. Then you can grab any random consultant or LLM with a fresh context and get them to work.
- orsenthil 2mo ago> I think it funny how much average engineers are beginning to discover the challenges of engineering leadership and program management. This looks like we choose to hear what we want to hear. The understanding argument is about making the point that "The point was always to augment" the human understanding when we worked with the machines.
- gofreddygo 2mo agoNot true. Engineers are finding a new set of challenges but nothing of the sort that managing real people requires. PMs, managers and leaders behaving like status update junkies is a side effect and not the reason why those roles exist.
- deterministic 2mo agoI’ve managed large software teams for 10+ years and also worked as an individual developer. In my experience, most middle managers, probably 90%, have no clue how to manage software developers. It’s not that hard to manage teams IMHO, but you need to focus on the right things.