We flipped from an Epicurean mindset to a Stoic or Nihilistic mindset. IOW, we stopped talking about helping people lead good lives and started talking about how we can all weather stress and work hard and deprive ourselves of good things to build something. Or we're talking about how nothing matters so why bother?

Some people long for a savior-leader to come along and right the ship. An Obama that can from the top make all the stuff underneath right. They can’t do it themselves because structurally they, the middle or lower layer, are deadlocked, or the system makes things unsurmountable. But then it turns out that the savior-leader can’t make things right because they too are a product of the system. Just as convinced that the system is too broken for them to fix.

Sounds like you’re really going through it. Sorry to hear

cos people will do things for money. Regulate money, tax better, redistribute better. Give more people the power to say "no" as opposed to "holy fuck I need to make rent next month".

Politically addressing needs has the same issue as regulating money, its unpopular either because of billionaire marketing or general ignorance and cognitive dissonance. Also resource allocation is hard when people interpret any level of cut as murder. So you're hemmed in on both sides while FPTP makes it impossible to be honest with the electorate where jetpacks for everyone and free head is what wins you elections, regardless of its delivery.

While some commenters might suggest socialism is the panacea, I think that's just a different format of the same sort of failure. The fundamental flaw in our societies is ourselves, as we build societies that reflect our own failures. We care for ourselves considerably more than we do others, sometimes aggressively against others, sometimes will utter, wilful ignorance of others. The big picture is too hard for our brains to deal with. We have no baseline emotional regulation, humans can wrap themselves into the same emotional state about leaving Britney alone as they do about the death of a loved one. This means everyone's needs seem the same, which makes resource allocation hard.

We see a similar whine about immigration where the abstract is simply: You get $10k and an immigrant moves next door, or you get $0k and an arbitrary person who isn't an immigrant moves in next door. Solve for the status quo. But people will elect governments on a policy of cruelty to think that status quo won't immediately rubber band back.

You need socialism. That is not a snark. I am serious. It is getting rarer in the world. Even the "left" is very capitalist.

As someone who has been CTO at a small company, senior leadership at a scaleup, and now middle management at a large co, I can tell you that what you are imagining is not structurally possible in our current system.

That's not say leaders here and there aren't thinking about what they're building and the macro effects, but you have to understand that unless you're bootstrapped and self-funded, even the most morally minded CEO is still beholden to investors who primarily care about money. You can only be as ethical as your board allows, and that primarily comes from profitability and financial success. In the good times its easy to talk a big game (eg. Google's "Don't be Evil"), but eventually competition comes for us all, and if your morality is hurting the bottom line you will be replaced. The backstop would be customer sentiment, but most buyers (whether B2B or B2C) are also not morally motivated. That's why free + ads is the dominant model, why micro payments failed despite years of techie hand-wringing, and paid consumer apps outside of streaming are vanishingly rare.

It's not all hopeless though. If things reach a high enough threshold of public sentiment then we can put legal and cultural pressure that will actually change things top-down. I think this is where AI is probably going as it's the most universally feared and hated impact across party lines that I have seen during my life, and the leaders in charge seem incredibly tone deaf about how it's being perceived, so I do expect regulation and softer forms of social enforcement to affect that trajectory. But if you're hoping for individual CEOs and leaders to fix our systemic problems, don't hold you're breath, they are just as replaceable as the workers under them.

The $5 trillion didn't come from nowhere. People spend money on the products because they are helpful.

However, you're right that most people at these companies are so accustomed to the "free money faucet" from ads, huge margins, etc. that it's incredibly easy to end up totally disconnected from reality. That's probably what frustrates you the most.

I will say - after having left Google just about a year ago now - that there is literally no better time to make money in tech than right now. AI is eroding the moat of all large tech companies, and skilled individuals with passion and drive can make a huge impact on the world with an incredibly small budget.

You'll make it. All of us will.

There's an intuitive appeal in having a coordination mechanism where good leaders decide which problems are important to work on and then get the smart people to work on those problems. But historically, societies structured that way haven't worked well; they struggle to get good signals on whether the solutions make sense, and the coordination mechanisms are vulnerable to subversion by bad leaders. The Soviet Union famously forbade anyone from researching genetics for decades because a crank named Trofim Lysenko who didn't think it was real happened to become politically popular.

Well, nobody said lifers. But you can't really get a management job without already having management experience. You typically have to be promoted internally, not just go look for a management job elsewhere with no experience.

I had the same instinct. Was about to copy paste it into ChatGPT to summarize. But powered through it. tl;dr: your job as a senior manager is to listen to people

I think "because they are helpful" is OP's point of contention. Tobacco isn't helpful, but it's a product that people spend money on.

It's awfully literary. It reads like James Joyce attempting to convey advice about effective leadership for technical teams. In my opinion, it's an obnoxious, pretentious approach to writing about practical subjects, but I may be in the minority.

I think it's just a characteristic voice. Just like you can tell Vonnegut, DFW, or Palahniuk from a couple paragraphs, Rands developed a pretty distinct sound.

To me, as a non-native speaker it feels like a series of interruptions and focus changes with no natural flow. Hard to follow.

This is just how he writes. Busy-executive-bullet-point style. Its not AI.

It's that opening paragraph.

> Coffee in hand, I sit down in the Cave. Any Tuesday during the work week, a sip, and I parse the calendar.

How many Tuesdays are there in his work week?

Terminal LinkedIn brain

Look up the organizational chart meme. Look at Amazon's chart. You'll know what's off.

Apart from the tone which is not my cup of tea either, I think what these types of articles/advice try to convey is that we (the working population) are still the monkeys we were thousands of years ago.

Sometimes we do stuff well because we like the other monkey we're doing it with. Sometimes we do stuff badly because we are an angry monkey. Sometimes we do the right thing but we cannot really explain why. We can sort of predict what the future will be like but not really well.

Management is pretending to "execute programs" and "align value chains" and "strategize on market trends" because the suits they wear are very expensive. But the reality is that they are also monkeys, who try to manage the emotions and urges and pitfalls of other monkeys by guiding interactions between the monkeys.

This kind of slightly wooly, slightly look-at-me-being-business-y kind of writing feels to me like selling your "I'm a monkey who can sometimes make other monkeys interact more effectively" as some cold hard logical skill.

Just felt like a pointless LinkedIn post, I don't understand what everybody else sees in this article.

A key job of management is to figure out what's actually going on, as opposed to just what people tell you is going on.

LLMs are inherently gullible.

I have a theory. How close does the following describe you?

* You're an engineer with 3-6 years of experience in a primarily IC role

* Maybe you've done some tech lead stuff, but you've never actively worked in engineering management.

* You feel that management (and HR for some reason?) is constantly in the way of you getting stuff done, and that your life would be easier if you could simply decline every meeting and only communicate through pull requests.

Humor me, please. I'll explain after.

Firm, but partial, disagreement.

People, especially in remote jobs, benefit from being organized into groups intentionally, with distinct rituals that enable them to operate effectively while they get to know each other better. Another person needs to design and oversee all that.

While you can provide templates for that structure that allow oversight to scale so that one person can oversee larger groups, that tends to be more effective in non-remote, and more predictable, work environments. Modern software development is very little of that.

I don't have much in-person experience with middle management in contexts outside of software development, and I suspect there are some opportunities to use AI to bring engineers closer to customers.

I don't agree with this.

But I also found the article really unsatisfying. The idea that middle management should spend enormous amounts of time building relationships because other middle managers got vibes that one day it might be useful is insane. I think the article represents the worst of big, slow tech bureaucracies.

Replacing middle management with AI would not work, but using AI to avoid managers needing to have all these meetings would probably work really well. The idea that there's some AI system that has access to all the documents/email/task management systems at the company is a good one, and it could identify situations (like the one in the article) where two projects on opposite ends of the organization are colliding.

Instead of two middle managers needing to do 1:1s with no clear need for years because other middle managers got vibes that they should could be replaced by an AI system that uncovered situations like the ones mentioned in the article.

This wouldnt replace middle managers, but it might help them do their jobs better.

> You can only be as ethical as your board allows

Personal integrity is something you control for yourself. Nobody "allows" you to have it. If we still taught this and more people lived by it, we'd have a lot fewer problems.

It's the writing of someone who has been writing articles like this for decades now, instead of your average blogger or journalist. Just enjoy the difference.

Very. Short. Sentences. That’s AI

I think much of this kind of management faffery might be like advertising - I know half is useless, but I'll be damned if I can figure out which half.

We never found out who Mark was. Or what the problem with Rachel was. Or what and why behind and ahead of the pressure to meet either were in place. So going with not at all. They've literally described their job as having too much cruft that could have been partially solved by the non-existence of their role.

There is probably a middle ground somewhere between literal Soviet communism and unregulated capitalism. There are quite a lot of countries happily functioning in that middle ground, and while they're not making 15 people incredibly wealthy they're also not grinding the rest of the population into the ground.

“Verbing weirds language.” — Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes, https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25

Couple decades in with some leading but still remaining an IC officially.

The right work just doesn't get done without staff engineers and architect types having frequent conversations & meetings as well as constant code reviewing. Or long-term ICs effectively doing this role without the title and expectations/responsibilities (raises hand). You can identify these people because they ask questions relentlessly. Always well-considered ones, but even the ones that might make them look stupid in a meeting.

Coding is a small percentage of the work but also just as important. That's the sweet spot. The "non-stop meetings/socializing" people and the "headphones on & grind PRs" types are both two extremes of behavior that are boat-anchors in any organization and will bring productivity/customer-impact to a screeching halt if it goes unchecked for long enough.

And it's _always_ those stupid-seeming questions that uncover showstopping problems that would have bit you if left ignored.

Edit: Not to greenlight anything Palantir is doing, but in my opinion the FDE/FDSE model is probably everyone's near-future if your company is B2B. You can't be an "ignore meetings" type of person and do that.

> with distinct rituals

If you do rituals you'll get ritual compliance, not people getting to know each other better.

It’s a trap.

Adding AI to an organization that is somehow making process decisions based on "vibes" isn't going to solve problems, it's simply going to add yet another problem generator to a dysfunctional system.

AI Orchestrated Waffle Parties

> The idea that middle management should spend enormous amounts of time building relationships because other middle managers got vibes that one day it might be useful is insane. I think the article represents the worst of big, slow tech bureaucracies.

If your org has anywhere north of 100 engineers across separate teams, intelligence gathering and relationship/trust-building is the only way to effectively do work that crosses the boundary of your team's area of responsibility. It's also the only way to protect your team from stepping headfirst into hot bullshit cooked up by clueless product managers, junior executives and other engineering teams who've unilaterally decided your area of responsibility is in their critical path.

> Instead of two middle managers needing to do 1:1s with no clear need for years because other middle managers got vibes

This isn't actually how this happens in practice. These 1:1s happen after their teams consistently have to share ownership over something or their work conflicts. It's more of a standup saying what your team is doing and what you're concerned about than a typical 1:1. You also calibrate the frequency as needed. For most of these it's a QBR but for some teams this will be monthly or even weekly. It's not "because vibes".

I mostly agree. I'm curious to hear more details about why you think AI cannot replace middle management?

You're misunderstanding the point, a CEO's control of the company is contingent on the boards approval. Yes, of course you can hold the standard for yourself, but you serve at the pleasure of the board and investors. The system selects for amorality because the incentive is profit. I agree with your statement in general, but even if 95% of people live by that rule, there still is systematic pressure to select CEOs out of the other 5%, because then 401k go up (including yours and mine).

that does not in any way make it correct

For the sake of moving this along, that describes me perfectly. Please, continue.

Human managers are inherently gullible; we've got no plausible path to unbias them. LLMs have at least one plausible path which is to train them to be a little bit cynical.

We're not going to call it "management" necessarily, but there is no question that LLMs are going to take over decision making from managers eventually. Why choose a monkey guessing what the evidence says you should do when you could have an optimised evidence-weighted statistical model making the bets? The only reason to use humans is there are still technical limits on how general the models are, limits that seem to be falling away at a pleasing rate.

Middle-management as we knew it at the turn of the 2010s is probably gone forever. You don't need to coordinate many many teams as you used to. Same as huge frontend team with dedicated support for graphql, etc. AI made most of that redundant.

By extension we're going to need a lot less middle managers as coordination problems decrease.

As for the point I think you're trying to make, the problem with middle management and other chokepoints in general (like PM teams) is that often they become an antipattern. They soak in all the information and then dole it out parsimoniously, so the typical experience as an IC is to be barely able to see the full picture

I have 35+ years experience as a manager and engineer at large enterprise tech companies (what the kids now call FAANG, though some of the company names were different back then), and was a Founder, CEO and CTO at a $7M VC funded company and several other "differently-funded" startups.

Which countries do you have in mind? In the vast majority of the world today, people can become billionaires if they build a large company selling lots of goods or services people want to buy, without having to justify to anyone why the stuff they make serves "real human needs". You can do it in China, in India, in France, in Norway, etc.

> Human managers are inherently gullible; we've got no plausible path to unbias them. LLMs have at least one plausible path which is to train them to be a little bit cynical.

Firm disagree on claims 2 and 3 (paths to unbias each), though I agree humans (managers included) are inherently gullible.

There's a lot of research into human biases and how to overcome (or at least mitigate) those biases; and one can in principle always hire a "no man" to look for things which can go wrong. This is kinda what corporate lawyers (and, I hear, corporate economists) are there for.

AI, unfortunately, have a weakness which isn't present in meat-based intelligence, one which won't go away even if we get brain-uploads to copy meat-minds into silicon to make better AI: the very fact of being cheap enables us to find their weaknesses by spamming a bajillion variations at them to see what slips past their cognitive blind-spots.

Unfortunately, my take on the second paragraph is even more cynical than yours:

> We're not going to call it "management" necessarily, but there is no question that LLMs are going to take over decision making from managers eventually. Why choose a monkey guessing what the evidence says you should do when you could have an optimised evidence-weighted statistical model making the bets? The only reason to use humans is there are still technical limits on how general the models are, limits that seem to be falling away at a pleasing rate.

We're already seeing LLMs take over decision making from managers, not because they're good in the "optimised evidence-weighted statistical model" sense, but because they're good in the "hyper-persuasive to lazy primate brain" sense.

This also shows the limits of the "hire a no-man" strategy, as this is happening despite the list of people saying "aaaaa this is dangerous!" including many of the people developing these particular AI models, along with some Nobel laureates, various campaign groups marching around with placards, and a bestselling book.

That is absolutely the only requirement for it to be correct. Words are defined by the way people use them, and that can change over time. A dictionary is a record, not a rulebook.

If we can just simulate the business accurately enough we can solve having to interact with the market… which is also trying to solve interacting with us… We just need to do it more accurately…

Something tells me people will still be in the mix here.

Management advocates for AI because see ICs as commodities that just need to be coordinated to "do the thing." In this situation, remove the mid-managers, replace the ICs with AI, and use AI to enable them to coordinate the "workers." They forget that organizations exist to organize human output, which requires nuance, empathy, and communication.

ICs advocate for AI because they believe they are "doing the most valuable work." A rational AI would see that and let them do it. In this situation, remove the mid management, replace HR/marketing/sales/etc with AI and use AI to enable them to figure out what to build and they build twice as fast. They forget that the "rational" choice might not be what is best for them, their project, or their career.

Each one rebuts this with the way the system has failed them (managers feel that workers do everything BUT the work that moves the company forward, ICs feel like they can do everything BUT the work that moves the company forward)

Interesting that humans can't be trained to improve ("be less biased") but AI can. I would say this is a much more damning conclusion for the AI replacing ICs than managers.

Whats easier, training AI to make good bets (what does that mean in business? Make the most money? Worker quality of life? World a better place?) or training it to get code to compile?

Plot twist!

> "optimised evidence-weighted statistical model"

Isn't such a model inevitably going to be lagging what is happening?

(Monkeys can see/smell/recognise the scat or track of a large cat very quickly and don't sit around to check the data)

Ha, excellent. I think you'll appreciate this then: https://imgflip.com/i/aswdth

I had a 50/50 chance of guessing which side of the bell curve you were on and I was wrong. :)

I love how he went back and updated some of his older but still relevant writings, like https://randsinrepose.com/archives/nadd/.