> So, a manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship

Right?? I saw that too. My first thought is that any good managers left will be racing for the exit. You can't fake "managing 15 people" with AI. You have to actually have the 1:1s and do the performance calibrations. How are they going to have time left for IC work??

They'll have to reduce these 1:1s and any formal meetings to a minimum (e.g. once a quarter), and deal less with career growth and people conflicts.

They'll switch to async communications for everything, and ideally have a bot that answers Mm-humm like a psychologist on his chair.

More seriously, the solution is to move to a flatter org, but that's a drastic change with unknown consequences for most companies.

As a manager with 10-15 reports at a company you've probably heard of, I think the main question is how much they will need to contribute. I put up a PR or three a week, usually in non-critical path flows or system support, and its honestly fine. I could barely contribute to the productivity level of even one of my junior engineers, but I can debug production issues and ship code AND be a good manager (with a decent work life balance).

I feel like managers should be able to contribute. Managing a good team isn't that hard, though managing a bad team (or a good team in the midst of a ton of bad processes) is a nightmare.

I think you'll have to work it out with your peers and collaborate... we here at $BigCo believe in individual ownership of the process.

"IC work" seems to have evolved at Coinbase to mean "supervise AI changes". Then the question becomes how will managers actually review these changes and not just press accept at 3:50.

Yikes. That's bad leadership at that top all around. But we already knew that when they announced layoffs. No good leader lays people off.

> manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship

Notable is what they're not doing--annual reviews. This duty is now handled by the all seeing "intelligence" machine that can evaluate employees in real-time.

Darkly funny that Armstrong's Twitter bio still reads "Creating more economic freedom in the world" when he has relegated humans to "the edge" of his own organization in favor of the pseudointelligent pseudogod.

Freedom for who, exactly? Coinbase's executives, I suppose.