One of the most useful functions of a good manager is to act as a shield for their team from upper management firestorms. That's a role that I think AI is particularly unsuited for, given their tendency to be obsequious.
As a more general role, the idea of responsibility is that the manager has the job of making sure that individual employees' tasks are suited both to their individual competence and abilities and to the corporation's deliverables and ultimate bottom line. This requires making arguments in both directions: in pulling employees to working on things more useful to the company, and in changing the deliverables to capitalize on employees' abilities.
As I get it (and I’m not a smart or well-educated person, so please correct me if I’m wrong or misinformed or talking nonsense), responsibility is status that arises from the recognition of one’s moral obligations. Companies are at least partially formed around shared moral obligations, or put simply - goals. At least without those they become meaningless economic machines, and our culture tends to favor things “having” a meaning.
With multiple agents (of any nature) feedback is essential for the work to be done well - that’s my understanding of how it translates to the actual work getting done.
I really think we are modern slaves in a pseudo-liberal capitalistic wrapper. It's going to become clearer to future generations looking back, similar to how we are now able to detect and understand mistakes of the past. Male toxicity and patriarchy for example only recently began to surface as a mistake.
While we still jobs and offer our services to society there are a number of things that need to fix and delete from our collective consciousness. All these stem from the same root of evil: the office. Similar to plants, we, the workers are gathering there, under some occult organizational umbrella which sometimes resembles a "family". We need to be there on a specific time, do specific things, we are being monitored and controlled. We need to behave in a certain way and leave our true self at home. We need to blindly obey a person called "the boss" or "the manager" and act under some military discipline executing commands. We need to climb some ladder of promises, most of which fail to deliver. This is a dark place full of lack of trust, insecurity and control.
Diversity, flexible working, remote working, shared vision and mission are some of the things that we have realized and applied. I am glad that we did but there is still a lot of work to be done. Working needs to be more like the freelancer/consultant type where possible: get the job done and you're paid attitude, rather than a weird let's have you around stand-by just in case. Similar to how an electrician comes to your place fixes the damage and immediately leaves, where possible workers need to do the same. Can you imagine your electrician spending her day at your place, 9-5? Sitting there just in case? And you will get to threaten, trash talk, be the boss and give orders.
We are still in the Palaeolithic era when it comes to how we work, with some improvements indeed but with also the heaviest pressure from the most powerful people globally.
I think that's spot on. The timing is good too as recently Meta published a new music generating AI agent which was trained on music outside of the public domain. IP concerns are up in the air and it looks like Neural Nets can be fed with anything these days.
Apparently this is a junior person's blog promotion and hence the controversial (or plain wrong for me) title which has raised several discussions here.
Since we are talking about it though, let's apply the 5 whys:
1. Why do companies need managers? Because they need they're employees to be managed
2. Why do companies need their employees to be managed? Because they are not certain that they will follow the company's short/long-term strategy and vision
3. Why are they not certain? Because they're having trust issues
4. Why are they having trust issues? Because they are not investing in proper hiring
5. Why are they not investing in proper hiring? Because it's expensive and requires tremendous multidisciplinary skills, time and effort
We are dealing with one night stands masked as serious dates ladies and gentlemen. Managers are just pawns which patch the original issue. Solving hiring would make them redundant.
I see what you mean and you're not wrong. However given that you hire good senior engineers and that you trust them, most companies can resolve these issues. Coordinating activities is a project manager's thing which should have to do with gantt diagrams and not with micro-managing engineers. Very few companies are having complex software similar to OS, therefore being in need of the management that you're referring to. It's astonishing how managers responsible for building a button are reading the mythical man month and think they are the same.
One issue is that people can agree on a general vision but differ completely on what problems exist, how they could be resolved, and what series of decisions support each other. It becomes overwhelming for people to think about.
Focus on writing down your thoughts and supporting them. Build a case for something and then make decisions and execute. If you can put together a cogent argument, even people who disagree can often stomach working hard on it as long as you acknowledge their criticism and occasionally reevaluate past decisions.
Alternatively, when an organisation reaches a certain size, there becomes enough high level coordination needs for it to be a full time job, and also some HR-type functions work better when distributed to the edges rather than the central org.
