> I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs
I have the opposite opinion. I've never been a CEO, and have intentionally avoided any sort of manager/C-level opportunities at all the various companies I've worked specifically because they require a lot of effort at personnel management, investor relationships, customer relationships, and generally things requiring having to talk to people.
That kind of thing just can't be replaced by a chat bot.
Exactly. Being a good CEO means reading the body language of your programmers so you can tell when they need support. It means communicating competence to investors and customers. It means making complex decisions with incomplete input, a lot of the time deep intuitions are required. It means having the good sense of judgement.
Part of the time you are tyrant, part of the time you are parent, part of the time you are psychologist, mentor, master, healer, empath, judge and jury, and the most important part : is knowing that ALL of this is REQUIRED to be human actions and a little text input spitting out (even under ideal conditions - excellent) quality text to the above is definitely not going to work because every good CEO knows that its 50% the message you deliver, and 50% the delivery that matters.
And also being a technical founder with 20 years coding experience, I dont think AI can replace programmers for a set of different but equally valid reasons.
I know this is mostly true at huge companies, but having spent my career at various "small" corporations, with maybe a few thousand employees total (and only ~50 of which were in IT). I was always surprised when the CEO knew names of people like me, the lowly developer 5 layers below them on the org chart, but beyond that, remembered the last conversation we had, or an interest we might have shared (golf, hiking, travel, etc.).
Even as a temporary consultant, at a company for only a couple of months, I remember seeing the CEO walk the hallway, greeting every single person on the way between a meeting room and the bathroom. I can barely remember my family member's names, or the last thing we talked about, let alone have the memory space for all that information to seem kind and courteous to "low level" employees.
In my entire career, I've never worked at a behemoth-sized company, though, so my experience has been much more "intimate" environments, and primarily in consulting firms or satellite offices away from the main HQ (even by only a couple blocks some times). So everyone in the office knew each other.
I worked at a 10,000 person company ~15y ago. I was a lowly employee at the time; just a run of the mill Research Analyst writing code in SAS. I got on the elevator w/the CEO, said hello, and he knew exactly who I was and what I did.
Two important grounding items for me when I went into management and my career accelerated:
1. Take the worst boss I ever had (coincidentally at the same company) and make sure that I do the exact opposite of everything they did when leading others.
2. Mirror the actions of that CEO and make sure I remember every single person and what they did; it leaves a lasting impression on people.
A good CEO according to the market, which is what counts in the US, is one that drives up the valuation of a company and increases profit in a mature company. It has nothing to do with personal interaction as most of us would prefer.
Well then you and I differ - I certainly dont turn to the market to define what is good, I guess thats what happens when you worship money, or are operating on the engineers fallacy where you ignore things that are hard to quantify numerically (e.g. empathy)
Yes, I agree. I think what people are maybe not considering is that while the aspects of the job can technically be automated, them being performed by a human cannot. As a human, you get special privileges. You can get more information out of people, you can be persuasive, you can be charming, you can compromise.
I think nobody would accept their manager being an LLM, and that's the issue. They want a real person they can talk to and see eye-to-eye with. It's the same all the way up to CEOs.
Sure you can have the automated CEO, but who will want to work with them? Won't they just... treat them like a stupid robot, like how we treat computers? Treat them as a tool to accomplish their own motivations? I mean, I never consider if I'm hurting my keyboard when I mash away. So how would an AI CEO actually work, without at least SOME fleshy face behind in front of it?
Having been an engineer and then a founder (and CEO), neither can be automated. Both require organizational work to be effective, and developer productivity is so profitable in an outsized way that you'd always just hire more if you could, even if they were all 10x as productive (maybe this changes at some scale).
I'd have loved for an AI to assist with a few things as a CEO but we would have probably just shipped faster and it would have created even more pressure for board communication, customer calls, design partnerships, legal discussions, compliance, etc.
The idea that AI is coming after leadership is truly laughable. The idea that it's coming after some engineering jobs is a bit more likely to me, but I think many will actually be more valuable.
> Having been an engineer and then a founder (and CEO), neither can be automated
Can it be fully hands-off? No. But I think, as will all things, their both subject to the rise of the "technician"s. A mechanic doesn't change your brakes or flush your oil, a technician does. You don't see a doctor, you see a nurse practitioner and an MD just signs off. All the work that used to be done by someone with schooling to learn how to do it is just done by a technician that learned how to use the tools without the critical thinking of the expert, but with an expert somewhere available if needed.
There's a scene in Breaking Bad, where after having shadowed Walter White as he ran a cook - one of the henchmen makes a batch insisting that it's just following a recipe (to which Walt describes all the things that could go wrong if the operator didn't understand the nuances).
American's can't help but try to automate our jobs away. We create systems, recipes, toolkits etc trying to minimize the amount of actual thinking required to do anything. Honestly, I think that's one of the reasons software quality has gone down across the board. We're already so many abstractions removed from doing the actual work, that most developers don't even know how to debug the systems beyond the highest layer. I've seen the rise of bootstrap devs, and jQuery devs, and react devs, and now it's vibe coders and harness engineers or whatever the latest things are. My examples are dev centric because that's my chosen role, but just look to say Amazon and their use of AI for performance evals and terminations. It effects management less technical jobs too.
> Can it be fully hands-off? No. But I think, as will all things, their both subject to the rise of the "technician"s. A mechanic doesn't change your brakes or flush your oil, a technician does. You don't see a doctor, you see a nurse practitioner and an MD just signs off. All the work that used to be done by someone with schooling to learn how to do it is just done by a technician that learned how to use the tools without the critical thinking of the expert, but with an expert somewhere available if needed.
This already describes how CEOs work though. CEOs aren't experts in every part of the company, they sign off on things and delegate, and manage communications etc. There's very little additional room to delegate because the role already is extremely delegation heavy.
> developer productivity is so profitable in an outsized way that you'd always just hire more if you could, even if they were all 10x as productive (maybe this changes at some scale).
Definitely. Software is a digital arms race between companies so they’ll just keep expanding. I’m sure at some scale that breaks down but we are far from that point. My lumberyard, a few miles away from one of ASML’s US facilities, still runs its POS and inventory tracking on old DOS machines. In a decade they could probably make more money selling them as antiques.
A lot of the value (compensation cost) of having a single leader is that the leader becomes a critical, irreplacable bottleneck and silo of information. AI can solve that by removing the bottleneck.
Genuine question: am I missing some sarcasm here? When you say a CEO has to "talk to people", and then say it can't be done by a chat bot. That's literally the only thing a chat bot can do.
Every person all the way down the chain thinks everyone else can be replaced by AI, but have some good reason that they themselves (or their role) can’t be.
Personally I think that almost any role can be augmented by AI, but very few can be outright replaced that we’re not already very close to an RPA bot replacing them anyway.
Then you consider that they might be able to reduce headcount because of productivity increases. But why wouldn’t they want to use the budget they already have for these newly more productive people and get even more work done overall?
There are some exceptions, like maybe you can be entirely rid of some L1 support.
> But why wouldn’t they want to use the budget they already have for these newly more productive people and get even more work done overall?
For all the same reasons many companies are eager to cut labor costs whenever possible. There can be a variety of bottlenecks to scaling and it's often not as simple as hire more people to make more profit, even if you have extra capital available.
Especially in investor relationships and customer relationships, the talking itself is often not the important part. Yes, you need to align on terms and goals. But the interpersonal component is arguably more important. You need to project that you are a trustworthy partner with compatible goals. And being present as the CEO (or other manager) also shows a resource investment into the future partnership. Your time is valuable, and you took some of that time and dedicated it to this meeting. A chatbot can't do that
What you're referring to is "talking at" people. But "talking to" people usually involves more than just moving your mouth (which chat bots can't, btw).
I have the opposite opinion. I've never been a CEO, and have intentionally avoided any sort of manager/C-level opportunities at all the various companies I've worked specifically because they require a lot of effort at personnel management, investor relationships, customer relationships, and generally things requiring having to talk to people.
That kind of thing just can't be replaced by a chat bot.