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Did engineering managers catch the luckiest of breaks?
[Engineering] managers existed because coordinating expensive humans was itself expensive. Someone had to translate business needs into specifications developers could execute. Someone had to review work product and maintain quality. Someone had to make the build-versus-buy decisions, the this-quarter-versus-next decisions, the what-not-to-build decisions. Someone had to make the organization the sort of place where expensive developers would enjoy hanging their hats. That coordination overhead was worth it because developer time was so precious.
Then agentic AI made code production nearly free, and a funny thing happened: all that “overhead” turned out to be the actual work.
Are EMs actually the ones poised to benefit the most from agentic coding? This article makes the case they have all the right skills for the coming AI age after honing their craft managing teams of engineers. Exchange engineers for Claude, Claude, and Claude and it turns out their job is the same.
Coming off a few years of flipping between tech lead and management, I have to agree. Trusting agents with coding is no big deal after you’ve had experience handing the reins over to your team. What’s more important is the process they (agents or humans) follow. Force agents to jump through the same engineering design hoops (design, plan, implement, review) and the results are impressively good.