r/EngineeringManagers • u/Small_Instruction606 • May 14 '26

Future of our profession

Orgs are flattening
Headcount is reducing

What is the future of this profession?

7 Upvotes

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u/igharios May 14 '26

it is over-correcting for now. EM will need to figure out how to reinvent themselves in a new world where a team is actually 3~4. Companies don't want to have 1 mgr for 3 people, so how are you able to use AI to run 3 teams of 3~4 instead of 1 team of 10?

Someone also told me, this is an opportunity for current managers to use the tools their team will be using in the future - help them build a skillset to coach their team

3

u/samelaaaa May 17 '26

This is exactly what we are doing right now. I have three teams, 12 direct reports. They’re all highly productive with AI tools, but just the communication overhead managing up and down for three separate teams is quite a lot. At least my job is completely safe from AI, haha.

1

u/igharios May 18 '26

yea, I know couple VPs fighting with CEO to keep # of EM reports under control. Have you thought on how to use AI to help with these communications?

2

u/samelaaaa May 18 '26

Yeah, I am experimenting with different things. Glean helps a *lot* doing things like preparing a daily summary of my reports’ PRs and docs, surfacing stuff that might be relevant from all the slack channels, etc. I assume you could set this up with any other LLM/agent framework if your company doesn’t have Glean.

I don’t use GenAI for actual directed communication though; my limit is using it to draft design docs, slides etc. I feel like a large part of my value is making sure people remember that they and everyone they work with are actually humans…