The Future of Teams - Pragmatic Summit

A few weeks ago I attended the Pragmatic Summit in San Francisco. It had a phenomenal line-up and I was excited to attend a conference for the first time in a while. Very well organized, great merch, and I was able to bring back home a book! The energy was vibrant and contagious, everyone was talking about AI (who isn't these days) and how they see the future. It's really hard joining these events and not feeling hyped for what's to come.

So there I was, surrounded by the leading minds of this AI wave. Everyone seemingly nodded and clapped at every answer. Gergely has done his research and was a great host. Even though we are used to his ability to interview, I still found it impressive. The first chat was with people from OpenAI, everyone was quietly listening. The room agreed on where this AI trend is leading us. The OpenAI Codex team supposedly writes 90% of their code with agents. If you have adopted AI at your company or on a shared project, the question is immediate: who is reviewing all of this code?

Writing code was never the bottleneck. Now that it has become quicker to accomplish (for the sake of discourse, assume the code produced is comparable to a human) it has helped highlight where the obstacles are. While I want to dig into this in another post, what surfaces here is the fact that, if we buy into this future of software development, things will change dramatically. I see some merit in what one of the guests said "Everyone will be a manager" but that should have been clarified. As someone who walked the management path, I find myself reviewing code more often than I write it. That's the only overlap I see with his statement. Delegating to a human IS NOT the same as delegating to an agent. Reviewing human-generated code vs agent-generated code is comparable (don't forget about the assumption we made earlier) and this is as far as I would push it. Also, not everyone will share the excitement since not everyone wants to be a manager anyway.

That statement was already a yellow flag which then evolved into a vision of a flatter hierarchy. Fewer managers (since I assume that when everyone is a manager, no one really is a manager). Now, I am all for regularly reviewing how your organization is structured and removing unnecessary roles. I don't buy into his example of having 30+ direct reports. I thought about this a while and could not figure out a realistic plan to properly and actively manage the growth of more than 30 people.

I thought about doing some math here.

• Let's say you have 15m 1:1s with everyone. That would be 7.5h of weekly meetings, and if you grow that to 30m slots it puts you at 15h a week of 1:1s. I will stick to the 7.5h since the math would still work if you decide to meet with your direct reports every 2 weeks instead of every week. Every single day you spend 1.5 hours in 1:1 meetings. This seems doable, not optimal, but doable.
• If you average 3 people per project, that means you have 10 projects in progress at all times. You, the manager, will be directly responsible for overseeing them (which is also doable). You are also responsible for each individual's growth opportunities. You can't afford any distraction. With these many people and these many projects things could spiral quickly.
• You can't skip performance reviews! Every 6 months I would assume that any decent manager will spend at least an hour per direct report in crafting a development plan and reviewing their work. That puts you at 30h of work (I'm starting to become very optimistic here!).
• Won't you have to discuss this with each individual? That would be at least another 30m per person, which adds up to 15h of meetings (adding the 15m from 1:1 puts you at 45m per person, minimum acceptable level).
• [...]

This is starting to sound quite exhausting and not something a good manager will be able to sustain long-term, unless you want to do a poor job. Or, unless you delegate EVERYTHING to an agent. At that point, no manager is needed to begin with (I really hope I am not predicting the future).

Between the "Everyone will be a manager" and "Flatter hierarchies means you can have 30+ direct reports" I was immediately skeptical about anything else after that. It seemed like this is the future they want to sell you and I'm having a hard time accepting that it's a good one.