Great news, engineering managers, we can all go back to coding! Whoo! 🎉
AI has taken an existing problem, frontline EMs feeling pressure to code, and pushed it to breaking point.
The cycle usually looks like this:
👉 Founder hires a CTO who’s really an individual contributor.
👉 CTO hires engineers. Team gets too big to manage.
👉 One IC gets promoted to manager, with little or no support.
👉 “Manager” defaults back to the thing they know best: coding.
🫠 No one notices until there’s serious dysfunction down the line.
AI now hands organisations a free pass to reinforce this. “They can manage and code now.”
Hang on there, pal.
Just because EMs can code doesn’t mean they should.
Sometimes it’s the right call. Most of the time it isn’t.
Because a manager deep in implementation, especially on the critical path, isn’t listening.
❌ They’re not resolving the conflict brewing in the team.
❌ They’re not noticing the senior engineer who’s quietly disengaged.
❌ They’re not catching delivery risk before it becomes a missed quarter.
✅ That listening layer, which is often invisible, is what keeps organisations healthy. And in the age of AI it matters more than ever.
Someone has to understand where AI helps, where it creates unacceptable risk, and what it’s quietly costing you in quality.
Great managers multiply everyone around them. But most orgs struggle to see the value of management, because most managers were never taught to manage.
They were strong coders, left to figure it out alone.
If you want a genuinely AI-enabled organisation, you need great managers more than ever.
P.S. I hope the lone, unmatched double quote in the image stresses you out as much as it stresses me. 🤣 You’re welcome.
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