Thomasbcn

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about whether AI makes people management more or less relevant. The EM role is definitely changing, but I’m getting more convinced my dream of “no management, only computers” isn’t coming anytime soon. Technical leadership is still deeply needed, but the bar will be a lot higher. We’re shifting the bottleneck from execution to judgment. Coding, debugging, even parts of architecture will be commoditized. Meetings, process, updating Linear… all of that is solved. It’s about alignment, cohesion, and decisiveness. Teams will get smaller and more autonomous. You can hide one underperformer IC in an 8 people team. In a 3–4 people team, one person can become an existential risk. That raises the bar for hiring and performance management. On top of that, managers will need to handle both humans and AI: what to automate, what needs human supervision, how to manage security... The bar for ICs goes up significantly too as code becomes disposable: stronger product, business and design sense, better intuition, better internal and external communication. So no, I don't think SWEs and EMs are going away. But the roles are changing fast, and not everyone will adapt.