The Manager Layer is Next

There's a pattern I keep seeing across organizations. A cross-team initiative needs a decision. You ask the manager. They say, "Let me go chat with the team about that." Two meetings later, you get a non-answer wrapped in process. Nothing ships.

That's not a bad manager. That's a job description that never required anything more than information routing. And AI is about to make that job structurally impossible to justify.

The question is: which managers are actually load-bearing?

The scale-up era created management debt

Between 2019 and 2022, engineering organizations hired fast and structured even faster. Every team needed a manager. Every manager needed a skip (their skip-level, one rung above). The result was coordination layers that produced more meetings than output. Elena Verna makes the case that AI is making it possible for senior ICs (individual contributors -- engineers who build, not manage) to drive company-level impact solo -- which reframes everything.

A lot of that structure was justified by the real complexity of coordinating large teams. But it was also justified by something simpler: when teams are big enough, someone has to handle the status updates, the ticket grooming, the "what's the status on this?" Slack messages. Someone has to be the human who ferries information between levels. That's the work AI is absorbing first. Not the strategic decisions. The information routing.

When you remove the information routing, the pure people manager's job description gets very short very quickly.

The conduit manager can't survive

The defining characteristic of the kind of manager AI is now exposing: they couldn't take a position. Not because they were conflict-averse (though sometimes that too), but because they genuinely didn't have enough technical or business context to form one. Every question that crossed their desk got answered with a team consultation. They were a conduit.

This isn't a character flaw. It's a job description. The conduit manager isn't lazy -- they're often working very hard. But the work is information arbitrage. They had organizational access their reports didn't, and they used it to route. Coordination overhead filled their calendar.

AI is dissolving that asymmetry. As agents get better at pulling context from Slack threads, docs, and tickets -- and reports can get business context directly -- the information-arbitrage argument for the coordination layer collapses.

Good people management -- running performance conversations, developing careers, de-escalating team conflict -- is real work that AI isn't absorbing. But that work doesn't fill a full management headcount slot the way coordination did. When the coordination overhead goes away, what remains doesn't justify the layer.

What actually survives

The job forks hard, and the version that survives looks very different from the version that doesn't.

The version that survives is the player-coach. Not in the hollow "I stay technical" way that senior managers say and don't mean. In the literal sense: someone who holds both the technical and business context deeply enough to make hard calls when priorities conflict, represent their team credibly in any room, and make the call without running it by six people first.

The best rooms I've been in as a director are the ones where every director in the room is technically grounded. We can align on org positioning quickly because none of us need to go back to our teams to understand what's technically possible. We can take tradeoffs on the spot because we hold both sides of the equation. That kind of alignment is fast, durable, and nearly impossible to replicate with a layer of coordinators in between.

That's what AI can't replace: a director who can rapidly align across technical and business priorities, own the hard tradeoffs, and drive direction on both fronts without needing to assemble the right people first. The best directors are the ones who could succeed in either an IC or EM role. That's what makes them load-bearing. The coordination-only layer isn't.

The career question nobody's answering honestly

The conversation about AI and management mostly happens at the level of "will managers be replaced?" That's the wrong question. The right question is: which kind of manager survives?

My honest take: Director and above jobs survive if the person can make real technical bets. The CIO Dive piece on engineering role shifts frames it as "AI saves time, then review explodes" -- as I've written before, the review bottleneck is real. But the deeper implication is that the review shift moves judgment upstream, to the person deciding what to build and why. That's not a coordination job. That's a technical leadership job.

The manager level gets squeezed hardest because it was always closest to the coordination-and-reporting work that AI absorbs. The layer above faces a different pressure: when the middle compresses, there's less org structure to manage and more direct accountability to deliver. The job gets leaner, more technical, and less about headcount.

The IC path, meanwhile, is getting more interesting than it has been in years. Senior engineers who can direct agents, own entire product surfaces, and ship like a small team are valuable in a completely new way. As I wrote in AI Is Redefining the Senior Engineer, the ceiling for what one person can build is rising fast. The Engineers Codex is already tracking how misaligned incentives push engineers toward the wrong behaviors -- gaming token counts, manufacturing complexity for promo cycles. The solution isn't better metrics. It's fewer layers between intention and output.

Where I Land

I keep my IC muscles sharp because I believe the player-coach model is the only version of engineering leadership that holds up through this. Not the pure manager who coordinates. Not the pure IC who doesn't care about the org. The person who can build credibly, decide clearly, and keep the team pointed at the right problems.

Management isn't disappearing. It's forking. The people who thrive on the other side of this aren't the ones who managed most effectively in the coordination sense -- they're the ones who could always have been staff engineers if the career ladder had gone differently. The ones who went into management because they wanted impact at scale, not because they wanted to stop doing the technical work.

If you're a manager today, the question isn't whether to go back to IC. It's whether you can credibly hold both. The scale-up era made it easy to build a career in the middle. The current era is a lot less forgiving about what you can actually do.