alt Hacker News> So, a manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship
Right?? I saw that too. My first thought is that any good managers left will be racing for the exit. You can't fake "managing 15 people" with AI. You have to actually have the 1:1s and do the performance calibrations. How are they going to have time left for IC work??
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"IC work" seems to have evolved at Coinbase to mean "supervise AI changes". Then the question becomes how will managers actually review these changes and not just press accept at 3:50.
I assume they will have absurd metrics, like number of commits and token use to,determine how good of an IC you are. So, you start a bunch of agents in the background, merge their PRs without review, while having 1:1 and other meetings with your team. Productivity they call it
They'll have to reduce these 1:1s and any formal meetings to a minimum (e.g. once a quarter), and deal less with career growth and people conflicts.
They'll switch to async communications for everything, and ideally have a bot that answers Mm-humm like a psychologist on his chair.
More seriously, the solution is to move to a flatter org, but that's a drastic change with unknown consequences for most companies.