“Every Engineer a Manager” by Gordon Seidoh Worley

For a long time we’ve thought of software engineers as split into two tracks: Individual Contributors (ICs) and managers. This divide made a lot of sense when we needed an army of engineers to write code. Now we have Claude and Codex and Grok and Kimi. They write the code for us, and the job of an IC is to manage their agents. Functionally, this means that every IC is a manager now. True, ICs don’t manage people, but they manage a team of bots, and that means they face many of the same challenges that managers do. Like multitasking. Sure, everyone had to multitask some, but for years we’ve encouraged ICs to focus, avoid distractions, and just do one thing at a time. We told them to do that because it was the only way for them to produce high-quality code. But now that agents take care of the code, ICs find themselves needing to manage many threads of concurrent work, nudging their agents along to the right outcomes, and deep focus is becoming less important than the ability to track parallel tasks. Or giving feedback. Managers have to give feedback all the time so that the people [...] --- First published: August 27th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aTst2RJMFra4zsdzz/every-engineer-a-manager --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.