Are Senior Managers coding in your workplace with AI? Do they add value?
Posted by Working_on_Writing@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 34 comments
The latest AI hype bollocks on LinkedIn is VPs and CTOs bragging that they're shipping features using agents and claiming that this is the future for management positions.
I'm highly skeptical of this. I'm still seeing a landscape where as someone in engineering management, I don't have time to meaningfully engage with the details of the codebase. I suspect that if I went in and started pumping out PRs I'd just be causing chaos and circumventing the process.
I'm yet to see a post on LinkedIn from a senior engineer gushing about the value add from their CTO making a drive-by 40 file PR...
What are engineers seeing on the ground? Has your senior management chain started opening PRs? Is it a good thing?
muntaxitome@reddit
Yep, and they get defensive to when you politely point out some things will have to be fixed before merging. Recently CTO came with a vibe coded mess to move some project from one programming language to another. It would straight up corrupt our database if you put it live. Had a tantrum when I explained it would take some weeks to fix and review that 30k line monstrosity.
Weirdly he is like the nicest and most understanding guy in the world. Like I legit believe he means it well.
StickyDeltaStrike@reddit
It feels like we should let them fail to educate them
Void-kun@reddit
That's not our job to leave them to fail, our job is to call this shit out when we see it and educate them ourselves.
A good manager understands they don't know everything and will listen to those that do.
If they don't listen to their employees then it's not worth working with/for them.
PricedOut4Ever@reddit
Hit the nail on the head.
I’m inclined to give a few PMs and designers code access so they can vibe code to their hearts content. My guess is it will take a few db crashes for them to stay in their own lane. I’m a bit worried though if Claude is able to just circumvent it with a wipe it all workflow.
Also, totally down to do a demo of any feature we were able to do and ship without needing any of their input.
TheTacoInquisition@reddit
I hear this a lot, and on paper it would be fine. However, when push comes to shove, I've NEVER seen the failure get attributed to the people it should have been attributed to. Engineering is always in the crosshairs, and the questions around "how was the allowed to happen" is always put onto engineers. They hate when we didn't gatekeep their failure from affecting customers, but they hate us gatekeeping their attempts to do just that.
Unless they're willing to publically announce to the company that THEY are making the change, and that THEY have reasoned about the risks and will take responsibility for it, then they'll just thorw engineering under the bus for not having bulletproof systems to stop them doing stupid things.
Happy_Breakfast7965@reddit
It's helpful to make a backup first.
devise1@reddit
Making it incremental is easier than ever just going to take him slightly longer to get the agent to come up with an incremental plan and start stacking PRs.
vanit@reddit
This tracks. AI bros want all the credit and none of the responsibility.
Void-kun@reddit
Managers no.
They are still in just as many meetings, still managing roadmap with product, still doing people management etc.
AI hasn't reduced any of that, it's only increased it because the teams are moving through their roadmapa faster.
taglius@reddit
Brings up a related question - how do these director/C-suite types have time to vibe-code? Don’t their high level management duties (for which they are usually paid well above the coder ilk) take up all their time?
nkondratyk93@reddit
depends on the model. the Boris Cherny stat (259 PRs in 30 days, zero written by him) isn't managers-coding-features. it's managers-reviewing-AI-output-at-scale. the job shifted from authorship to judgment. if you're pumping PRs via agents yourself, yeah that's chaos. if you're the judgment layer on top, that's actually a different role.
Flashy-Whereas-3234@reddit
Yes, some of the old guard who moved up to management are back on the tools and having fun.
Mostly they chaos engineer off to one side, have their own repos (if they have repos at all) and we let them do what they want todo.
Occasionally they ask for credentials to things and we give them side eye and make clear policies.
And then there's the problems. They frequently YOLO prototypes up the 80/20 rule, where it's 80% done but that last 20% takes 80% of the time and they can't figure out why the team are so slow as they try and understand wtf this is, test it, integrate it.
And then theres comments like "I could do that with Claude in 5 minutes" which make me "you are welcome to." The code is not the problem, the domain, testing, safety, review and release is.
I'm finding bad management practices are amplified now every senior manager acts like they are their own start-up.
deepmiddle@reddit
This right here. I keep saying that software engineering has always had a number of bottlenecks. We’ve simply improved one of them with AI. The slow things are still the slow things.
Temporary-Ad2956@reddit
Funny thing is, managers and pms are more likely to get replaced by ai than devs 😂
TheTacoInquisition@reddit
I had to review a PR from the CEO in my last job. The PR was 800 lines long, and didn't solve the issue in an acceptable way. It violated multiple of our basic rules, and so I rejected it.
The new VP engineering was mad that I held it up to account, but I stood my ground on purpose as I would rather him and the CEO mad at me (I was intending to leave so didn't have much to lose politically), than pat them on the collective heads and say what had been done was fine. I then documented the work to redo the PR and solve the issue in an acceptable way, and got it reviewed. New PR was \~150 lines, including tests.
Now, I don't have an issue with senior management making PRs, or using AI to create them. In fact, in many cases I'd encourage it, since it can get rid of some of the small backlog issues that are never going to get prioritised over chunkier things. But, it MUST be part of the appropriate process, and senior management MUST be OK with engineering taking more time to tighten up the CI gateway mechanisms to auto reject PRs that do not adhere to standards, are too big, violate architectural concerns, or contain changes that require engineers to consider. If the last one happens, then the work needs to fit into the engineering priorities. No dropping more valuable work because the Cxx told a customer they could have X fixed by tomorrow morning.
In the case of the CEO making a PR, I sympathised with them. They were trying to fix a real issue a customer was having, and the customer had raised with them. I want a world where the CEO can do what they did. But the problem was the blindsiding engineering with a crappy PR that didn't hit the standards and the expectation that we not only drop everything to push it into production, but that we take responsibility for it AND don't shift timings on anything else. THAT is unacceptable.
LuckyWriter1292@reddit
Yes and no - any ai generated app has awful code, no security and is buggy...
I let ai loose on uat to show my old ceo what it would do - it added and deleted tables, data and corrupted the proof of concept.
He got very defensive, I left and he wouldn't listen and I got a call to work for free or else... I laughed and hung up/blocked him.
It's all b.s and I am the "ai" person at my new company - we have a "human centric" ai approach.
CodelinesNL@reddit
Managers who do this add negative value. They are detrimental to the company at many different levels.
It's not just that the software they produce is shit, they are completely undermining the expertise of the people they are supposed to be able to trust. It signals the complete and utter failure of a manager that they publicly expose they are unable to form a team of professionals that can get the job done. It's your only job, and you failed at it. Congrats.
PositiveUse@reddit
The thing is: it’s a fight for survival currently out there. AI is not just risking the jobs of Software Engineers but more so than ever the jobs of product (and other forms of) management.
If competent engineers can take over more responsibilities due to AI, you don’t need non-technicals anymore (at least in the heads of the C-level). So why have someone who CANT control AI and use it for engineering tasks… if you can have a technical person that is augmented by AI, does agentic coding and understands business?
MotoChondrion@reddit
One of our C-suite executives vibe coded our new website (migrated from a really old PHP stack). It went live a few weeks back and, surprisingly, there haven't been any major hiccups.
Sure, we had some "less used features" that were missed but overall, no dip in conversions, no traffic generating pages missing, or similar. They took us through their process and although they're not a developer - they have solid logical thinking.
I must admit, I was a little skeptical at first, but you can't really argue with results.
_5er_@reddit
In my company it's kind of like 50:50, especially regarding agentic coding. I could categorize seniors in 2 groups: highly intelligent and average joe.
Intelligent seniors claim they can write faster without AI, considering long term. They probably see more misakes and anti patterns I guess.
Average Joe seniors ship code fast, introduce a lot of duplication and other bugs along the way. They are still average Joe, just contributing 10x of more average code.
From what I've seen, agentic pull request are horrible. I have to review pull requests with 2-3k lines changed. They do a lot of duplication, to the point of questioning if this is maintainable long term. They add a lot of comments, often misleading. They write a lot of unmaintainable tests.
Unfair_Long_54@reddit
A higher manager refactored whole code base for adding a rediculous feature (for his personal training to learn how to use AI). Another genius asked AI to review his change and merged the code. Now its weeks our team is testing and bug fixing.
What bothers me is when they merged code they were blaming me for a while why I'm resisting to use AI like that person.
StickyDeltaStrike@reddit
RageFucker_@reddit
Yes, but in my org (AAA gaming with many studios) many of the senior managers (including some directors and a CTO) actually maintain their engineering skills and still are domain experts in whatever part of the code they maintained when they were engineers, so it's not a big deal. The ones who haven't maintained their skills as much just help out with small tasks like quality of life fixes that have been on the backlog for a long time.
Sounds like I'm lucky to have not yet witnessed C suites pretending to be engineers when they haven't written code in years.
ratttertintattertins@reddit
Yes sometimes. Although, our senior manager used to do my job and he’s actually a very good programmer (the first I’ve worked with who is) so it’s not an issue.
Reasonable_Working47@reddit
Yes, and they are providing quite a bit of value.
They're engaging in offline data analysis, reports, charting. It's non production stuff but still extremely useful. They have all the domain knowledge, and these kinds of tasks are things that struggle to get prioritised. So at least for us, it's additive.
Where AI is eating open positions are people like me who are much more productive, that I don't need more people around me to create high impact.
Ozymandias0023@reddit
One of the higher ups made a massive commitment a while back and all it did was add a markdown file to each of like a couple hundred directories. Each file is maybe 50 lines and as far as I can tell pretty much useless, but of course we all smile and applaud him for "coding again"
saltedappleandcorn@reddit
My experience at small SaaS firms (15 devs). yes they are using it, no it's not adding much value. They are enjoying it and it's letting them explore ideas, but it's not part of any core value.
blablahblah@reddit
I haven't seen anything from senior eng managers, but I have gotten some review requests from the senior product managers who are happy that they can now write their own fixes for those UX nits that always got pushed behind other priorities.
It's a bit annoying to review because the PRs tend to be on the large side and the AI usually only adds superficial testing, but I wouldn't say it's causing chaos.
lqlqlq@reddit
I enjoy making PRs, especially fixing things or adding stuff that's perpetually below the cut line. I finally can fix it!!!! I know my limits and pick up work off the critical path, make sure not to be stomping around in areas the team is doing a lot of active work in, etc. also send PRs for this kinda stuff to other teams and random bits of the code base.
it is really nice and improves my mood a lot. and it doesn't detract at all from my EM work. I prompt and review in between my meetings, especially those first 5 min waiting. you have to prompt very carefully, make sure to review its plan, have an agent setup so one is reviewing the other, etc.
oh and tools. automation. i have made so many skills and scripts, that have saved me probably 5-7 hrs a week, all boring stuff. that time i saved i've reinvested in coding, as well as better quality people management.
PineappleLemur@reddit
Unfortunately they are.
Those are people who didn't code in 5-10 years, can barely read code at this point.. but push shit to production.
It fucking sucks, no they add no value. They create more work especially when you need to explain to them why their "fix" is a temporary solution to a long term problem.
Unstable-Infusion@reddit
yes
no
They mostly build vibe coded monstrosities off in their own little repos where they can't hurt much. As long as they stay there and keep wasting their time on glorified mock-ups , i don't really care.
cosmopoof@reddit
Yes, they are, and they add huge value. In many cases it's much easier to deliver a prototype as specification than writing everything down in prose and architecture diagrams and everything and then hoping that nothing gets misinterpreted on the way.
Usually, the people who make the best use of something are not the ones you'll read about on LinkedIn - because they're way too busy focusing on delivering results.
stedmangraham@reddit
They definitely are, but it isn’t replacing anyone at my company. It might be speeding up coding times, but that wasn’t the main bottleneck to begin with
CockConfidentCole@reddit
FAANG and you bet they are!!!!