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by madrox·3d ago·view on hn ↗
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.

14 comments
I’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.

This 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.

LLM doesn't need soft skills, but just knowing how to write a prompt to get the correct percentage values in a RAG and get the result close to your expectations out. Well it might be different based on the training data, which ai company, and how much you're paying.

People are different, they will be sometime affected by their emotional situation, surrounding, no matter how much they're being paid, You need to understand their mental situation, did he got scolded by the upper management today? He might not be on his best of his capacity right now. Or they might've pulled an all nighter and really not in their best position.

If someone going to treat people like an LLM, definitely is not going to have good time

Ironically, the same applies to AI. We seem to get demonstrably better results when speaking to models encouragingly [1]. It's a lot easier to re-establish goodwill when you can clear the memory and context of a program vs. a human though.

[1] https://x.com/MTSlive/status/2086884672106299878

But 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.

Soft skills isn't just about being nice.

It's about knowing the capabilities of people, what can they do, what do they excel at and where they need support.

The exact same applies to LLMs, each of them have their own very distinctive styles as well as strengths and weaknesses.

Just like human engineers, LLMs can't just be plugged in to the same role as the previous one with the same instructions and expect the same results.

Thus: soft skills.

> 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.

> 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."

Talking to an LLM is not a skill, just like using Google is not a skill.

Why? One, the companies like Google or Anthropic or OpenAI are working hard for it not to be a skill. That's the whole point. Second, these system are opaque, so there is no understanding to happen, only superstition, which might be wrong or change tomorrow.

> just like using Google is not a skill

I beg to differ. It is a simple skill that a great many have, but that doesn't make it “not a skill” - there are certainly many that don't have it, or don't want to practise it. Though I wouldn't name it specifically for Google, it is the more general “finding information online” skill which feels more specific because for many people these days it doesn't extend much beyond using Google or whatever their browser's default search service is.

People without the skill are quite evident: many of the closed duplicates on SO and similar sites are due to people lacking the skill to find information in old answers and effectively just asking others to look things up for them, the same for this week's 20th+ “my first layer has these bumps and gaps, what is going on?” question on any 3D printing forum (facebook groups etc.) that could be answered by scrolling down a few posts, and I'm sure the equivalent happens in groups serving any other plaything/hobby/skill/whatever.

I disagree, both of those are skills.

Neither are skills that a large portion of users of those services pursue to any meaningful extent, I'll grant you that. They also certainly are not synonymous with the term "soft skills" as I know it. So I think I am on your side of the fence on that part any way.

> avoided learning the soft skills

LLMs don't have emotions?

I don't think soft skills describes it in the traditional sense. The skillset largely needed with LLMs is more akin to being an editor or qa tester.

I suppose you could describe having the modesty to admit to yourself when you don't understand and research something deeper could be described as a soft skill, but I'd say it's a stretch. You are dealing with yourself in that scenario, not others.

You’re still responsible for what you and the team ship if the team is human. Trusting your people just means you’re willing to take the fall if they mess up.
Yes. That is what trust means. And being able to trust the right folks makes a good manager.
And being able to trust the agent when you can makes a good engineer
> 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.

The best managers make it such that underlings don’t need to go to BS meetings and keep others from interrupting you with inane nonsense.
> 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?

To 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

There'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.

Maybe, 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.

yeah, 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..
cant 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."
That 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:…”
Simply 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 ..."
You do know it can already do that?
If 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.
Until an AI does that, it won't be able to pass a Turing test.
AI passed the Turing Test empirically long ago. Further and more practically, they consistently convince millions of people that they are a real person with real intentions all the time, every day.

They are so convincing that an emergent property of the Turing Test is also being shown: that real humans are called bots by people that genuinely believe the other is a bot.

The standard 3-person Turing test with 2 people talking and a third observing and trying to decide which is a computer, if any, has been summarily defeated.

Claude Code won't pass my personal Turing Test until I get a lot more "no" and "can't be done" out of it.

(For the record, my comment above was in jest, to point out the real experience of humanity in most coding environments)

So 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.
There 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.

I 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.

Aren't you just taking the same dismissive attitude towards management and doing it to engineers?
I 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.
As 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%

"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.
i can’t believe you’re True Scotsmaning all of the people who you have reported to
I’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.

> 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.

What book would you recommend?
Also interested
Not 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.

Actually, 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.