Very interesting points, if I was still in middle management these things would be keeping me up at night!
One point I query is “this is a totally new thing no manager has done before, but we’re going to have to figure it out”—is it that different from the various types of tool introduction & distribution / training / coaching that managers already do? I’ve spent a good amount of my career coaching my teams on how to be more productive using tools, running team show-and-tells from productive team members on why they’re productive, sending team members on paid training courses, designing rules around use of internal tools like Slack/Git/issue trackers/intranets etc… and it doesn’t seem that different to figuring out how to deploy LLM tools to a team. But I’m rusty as a manager, and I don’t know what future LLM-style tools will look like, so I could be thinking about this incorrectly. Certainly if I had a software team right now, I’d be encouraging them to use existing tools like LLM code completion, automated test writing, proof-reading etc., and encouraging early adopters to share their successes & failures with such tools.
Does “no manager has done before” refer to specific LLM tools, and is there something fundamentally different about them compared to past new technologies/languages/IDEs etc?
I think the general vibe of “this hasn’t been done before” might have been referring to fully automating the manager job, which possibly comes with very different scaling of human- vs AI managers. (You possibly remove the time bottleneck, allowing unlimited number of meetings. So if you didn’t need to coordinate the low-level workers, you could have a single manager for infinite workers. Ofc, in practice, you do need to coordinate somewhat, so there will be other bottlenecks. But still, removing a bottleneck could changes things dramatically.)
Very interesting points, if I was still in middle management these things would be keeping me up at night!
One point I query is “this is a totally new thing no manager has done before, but we’re going to have to figure it out”—is it that different from the various types of tool introduction & distribution / training / coaching that managers already do? I’ve spent a good amount of my career coaching my teams on how to be more productive using tools, running team show-and-tells from productive team members on why they’re productive, sending team members on paid training courses, designing rules around use of internal tools like Slack/Git/issue trackers/intranets etc… and it doesn’t seem that different to figuring out how to deploy LLM tools to a team. But I’m rusty as a manager, and I don’t know what future LLM-style tools will look like, so I could be thinking about this incorrectly. Certainly if I had a software team right now, I’d be encouraging them to use existing tools like LLM code completion, automated test writing, proof-reading etc., and encouraging early adopters to share their successes & failures with such tools.
Does “no manager has done before” refer to specific LLM tools, and is there something fundamentally different about them compared to past new technologies/languages/IDEs etc?
I think the general vibe of “this hasn’t been done before” might have been referring to fully automating the manager job, which possibly comes with very different scaling of human- vs AI managers. (You possibly remove the time bottleneck, allowing unlimited number of meetings. So if you didn’t need to coordinate the low-level workers, you could have a single manager for infinite workers. Ofc, in practice, you do need to coordinate somewhat, so there will be other bottlenecks. But still, removing a bottleneck could changes things dramatically.)