Article URL: https://karimjedda.com/engineering-management-after-cost-of-code-collapse/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048212 Points: 51 # Comments: 72

I have been a director of engineering for a bit over three years now, and I still hear and read what I call the "old rules" repeated over and over: a director should not spend time coding, good work takes time, protect the team from the business, get consensus before you commit, etc. For a while I thought the people repeating these lines were behind. Then we introduced LLMs in my org and the cost of producing code dropped, and I started checking each rule against the assumption underneath it. The surprising realization was that about half of the old rules were resting on assumptions that broke and the other half were resting on assumptions that did not, and a few of those matter more now than they did before. What follows is a cleaned-up version of notes I accumulated over the past year. Gemini 4 helped with the editing. The cost of producing plausible code has collapsed and it is not going back. Almost every claim beyond that is either unproven or wrong. If you rebuild your management practices on the narrow claim, you will be right. If you rebuild them on the broad claims you are gambling with other people's careers and calling it a conclusion. Every management practice rests on a certain assumption. Velocity tracking rests on output being a usable proxy for effort. Six month onboarding rests on syntax being slow to learn. Consensus driven architecture rests on change being expensive. Headcount planning rests on output scaling with people, and so on. The question for each practice is not how old it is but rather what the practice actually rests on. If a practice rests on the cost of writing code, put it under review because that cost moved. If it rests on how humans coordinate, build trust, allocate attention, or verify correctness, then nothing about it changed, no matter how dated the ritual feels.