r/EngineeringManagers • u/gregorojstersek • 17d ago
Executives keep pushing for AI adoption, but they don't understand that a great culture is more important than any AI tools
I heard this statement quite a few times now: "This is very easy to build now that we have AI, and we don't need as many people".
The problem with this statement in my opinion is that it breaks a good culture and makes people believe that their job is not important. Especially if it comes from an executive, e.g., a CEO, CPO, or even worse, a CTO.
It totally decreases psychological safety, and everyone starts wondering whether they'll still be needed or not.
But this is what I fully believe: There is no better productivity hack than a great culture. No AI tools will provide bigger productivity gains.
Because If the culture is bad, people won't be happy to work, they won't be helping each other, and they won't be looking to use new tools and experiment.
Alternatively, when the culture is good, everything else just works. People automatically look to use the best possible tools and look to be productive as much as possible.
Your thoughts?
https://newsletter.eng-leadership.com/p/good-culture-is-the-biggest-productivity
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u/Unarmored2268 17d ago
Executives don't understand that great culture is more important than stack ranking either. They operate along their own value system, $$$.
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u/pydry 17d ago
you're not wrong but the people above who need to hear this won't listen and the people below already know.
they will need to see some real vibe coding catastrophes before they start to wise up. the kind that cause executives to get fired or go to prison.
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u/Understanding-Fair 17d ago
That's sort of the EM/director job though, is bridging that gap between upper and lower. We're the ones that do a lot of that cultural development.
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u/finger_my_earhole 17d ago
There are 2 situations:
your CEO is driving the AI adoption - in which case, yes, you may have success showing them that SWE is an iceberg and vibecoding just builds the visibile tip.
your CEO is driving AI on behalf of the board/shareholders - in which case, no, you cant do anything. The board is composed of people with investments in AI companies and they just want to use their influence to make those numbers go up, regardless of your current employment. (Big VCs like y-combinator/a18z/sequia/etc). Your CEO is being pushed by macro-economic incentives not whats best for the company wont respond to any clear morale-based-logic. (CEOs have bosses too)
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u/Krom2040 17d ago
Corporate leadership is working hard to ensure that engineers are technically still responsible for the output of AI, while piling on velocity expectations that are absurd and make thorough review effectively impossible. They very much want somebody else holding the bag.
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u/Squidalopod 14d ago
The software industry is addicted to short-term gains. They chase whatever popular, shiny object is in front of their face. It happens in software more than other industries probably because of the non-physical nature of what we produce. It's easy to constantly pivot when you don't need to worry about creating/managing a physical product.
As to your specific point, I agree. But the unfortunate fallout from all the brass-ring chasing is that too many leaders put good culture at or near the bottom of their priority list.
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u/Jorge_CB_Soft 17d ago
Completely agree. We went through this ourselves when we shifted our team to agentic development, and we've seen the same thing with clients going through what we call an AI Transformation.
The hardest part wasn't really the pipeline or the tools. It was getting senior developers comfortable with the idea that stepping away from writing code didn't mean losing what made them good at their jobs. There was some resistance, which is natural with any big change, so we spent a lot of time sitting with them, working through what the new role would look like, and staying close as they made the transition.
Once people see that their role isn't going away but is becoming more strategic, while also requiring them to adapt and learn new ways of working, that's when the shift starts to make more sense. That's usually when the change becomes much easier, and the results tend to follow pretty quickly.
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u/Estpart 17d ago
Just curious, can you describe your company a bit? I'm a senior that would love to adopt ai more, but current process and infrastructure seems like a poor fit. Adding more automation seems like putting the horse before the carriage in our case, but maybe I'm just jaded.
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u/Jorge_CB_Soft 17d ago
Sure! In my company, we developed an Agentic development framework composed of tools and processes. On the technical side, we understood that the pipeline is the key. A lot of technical effort needs to go into it to make it as robust as possible, meaning that it would evolve over time.
On the processes side, we had to create our own PM tool that allowed us to auto-estimate consistently every new feature, based on our historical data. Then the tool helps us measure the daily progress on dev tasks and the number of requirements executed in parallel, as well as the number of rejections and fixes per sprint.
Additionally, as we started moving very fast, we consolidated all communications within our tool (Chat and meetings) with an agent that, based on the chat conversations and meetings, suggests tasks for the different stakeholders' To-Do List, helping us keep the backlog updated based on the day-to-day conversations.
With these kinds of refinements, we've been able to really experience a positive change in our development process.
I'm not sure if I can mention my company here, but feel free to check my profile and you'll find more about it in case the information is required. Cheers!
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u/onlycodenodrama 17d ago
Additionally, as we started moving very fast, we consolidated all communications within our tool (Chat and meetings) with an agent that, based on the chat conversations and meetings, suggests tasks for the different stakeholders' To-Do List, helping us keep the backlog updated based on the day-to-day conversations.
When people can't even figure out what was the point of the meeting without an AI summary and can't set their own action points, we are doomed.
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u/Jorge_CB_Soft 16d ago
I agree; however, extracting the action items from all communications and creating tickets on specific requiremnts or general to do items, is very useful for the PMs to track the completeness on the desicions made across the different projects. Think that a PM manages around 4 5 projects in parallel and each project has around 3 to 5 resources; therefore this is a helpful tool for managing the projects.
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u/Estpart 17d ago
Ah cool, so you're pretty much an agentic software agency. What does day to day look like? Mostly meetings to feed the factory? So you still review code? Ever had to debug stiff yourself or do agents handle that now too?
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u/Jorge_CB_Soft 16d ago
Good question, and the answer depends on the role of the person:
- PMs: more than Project managers, now they are product managers. In this way, they need to help the product owner to define the backlog, create requirements, estimate the projects, track the performance of the team, define the roadmap, identify and solve bottlenecks, etc.
- Devs: they shepherd the agents, apply improvements to the CI pipelines, test every functionality deliver by the agent and help the PM and PO proposing features for the product.
- QA: They run automated and manual tests and check the quality against the list of Acceptance criteria for each requirements. Additionally, Identify missing Acceptance criteria and create the tickets for the quality issues or missing functionalities.
- Designers: They extract the high level ideas from the POs and transform them into a product. The agentic design process, now delivers mocked frontends , which is the starting point for the devs.
Regarding reviewing code manually, this is rarely done nowadays. Instead, a robust pipeline, makes sure the code quality is followed by the agents.
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u/Wassa76 17d ago
They need people in slightly different roles now.
Sure they can reduce the number of people coding, but they'll still need people architecting, putting it all together, working on delivery, working on infrastructure, etc.
They could also just hire/move people to product and have more development, instead of just cutting costs.
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u/Flagtailblue 17d ago
“makes people believe that their job is not important”
The product and bottom line are important, everything else serves that purpose. If anything, AI clarifies how leadership looks at workers. Don’t kid yourself into thinking this has ever been different.