Perhaps:

- solve problems and conflicts

- escalate if neccessary

- communicate targets

But not:

- provide fuzzy warm feeling of belonging (at least in the companies where you are just a wheel)

So, replacing management is an old idea, but perhaps becoming feasible? Or did I miss something irreplaceable of the human element?

Google did a huge study of what makes a good manager (after trying to do without them) and found that a big deliverable of management is “psychological safety” for individuals when they are working as a team. Without that, people hoard information and spend all their effort to undercut each other, which is detrimental to the team and company overall.

At Google, where they foster a culture of intellectual safety. Their systems are so complex that no one person knows everything, and having people bullshit their way around things is dangerous, so people have up feel safe to ask "dumb" questions in order to make good decisions. At other companies with different cultural values, say Microsoft of the 90's with stack ranking, a good manager may need to foster the opposite in order for their direct reports to succeed in that culture.

Some people feel safer asking the LLM dumb questions, at least I do because of social pressure, but answers could be bullshit. I am retired but I could imagine that I only would proceed if I either had good enough references backing the LLM's answer or if I decided that my question is not so dumb after all and took the plunge to ask a human.

This seems to indicate that AI could relieve managers from answering dumb questions at least partially.

Are we talking about middle managers or line managers?

For line managers, the manager has to talk with human employees, and bad managers asides, that is where the human element comes in: fundamentally, your employees are still human.

On the other hand, if the line managers are all human, then the middle managers have the same human elements, too.

> It's popular with people who don't really understand how managers help groups of people work together efficiently.

Two of the biggest things people realize when they first become managers:

1. Managing is much harder than it looks from the outside.

2. Your past managers were probably dealing with a lot more than they let on. As an IC you think you know and see everything, but you're really only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

There are exceptions, of course. One friend is a manager at a company with more managers than ICs. By his own admission, managers there don't do much at all. Of course, the company is also bleeding money with little progress, so these situations usually don't last very long. My above points are in reference to real companies doing real work, not the rare retirement community for managers.

> Your past managers were probably dealing with a lot more than they let on.

Shielding ICs and managers below them from bullshit is probably a manager's most important job and they're doing that job well, the ICs won't be seeing their work, by definition, which leads to an interesting paradox.

The problem is that, based on personal observation, many, many current managers are actively bad at helping groups of people work together effectively. As in, I have personally known managers (not my own; this is as a third party, and I've been genuinely lucky in my managers over the years) whose teams would be better off with them simply removed from the picture and nothing else changed, they are that detrimental to getting work done.