If you work in tech, your manager might still care about your career. They just might not have enough time to do much about it.
Across tech, the Great Flattening has meant fewer managers overseeing larger teams and racing to keep up as the industry remakes itself around AI.
The result can be less time for managerial work that doesn’t produce an immediately visible result: coaching employees to help them figure out where their careers are going.
The days of “purely pastoral managers” running teams of five or six are over, said Paddy Lambros, founder and CEO of Dex, which uses AI to connect software engineers with employers.
At the same time, he said, managers are increasingly coding themselves, and the intense pace of work can make their relationships with employees more about getting work done and less about long-term development.
“It’s much more tactical and transactional,” Lambros said. “It’s not managing the human, it’s managing the work. And it’s much more sink or swim.”
Managers are back on the field
Mitchell Kosowski knows that pressure firsthand. The software engineering manager at a tech startup said he has about 20 people reporting to him, spends about five hours a day in meetings, and is also expected to code.
“The joke is I code 90% of the time, and I manage 90% of the time, which I think doesn’t feel like much of a joke these days,” Kosowski said.
Inevitably, some things fall away. Kosowski said he tries to protect time for coaching, however.
AI is accelerating the push to add and ship product features quickly, he said, leaving less room for managers to step back from immediate work. “Then we lose strategic career development talk,” Kosowski said.
The squeeze reflects a broader rethinking happening in tech about what a manager should do.
In the past, Lambros said, companies often pulled star performers into management roles as a way of “scaling impact.” Yet that didn’t necessarily mean those new managers wanted to coach others, or were good at it.
AI is changing that calculus, Lambros said, by making it more viable for top workers to sidestep the management track or stop managing. That’s what he’s seen at his company: Dex employs former founders, chief operating officers, and heads of engineering as senior individual contributors, rather than requiring them to oversee others.
“Freeing those people up to go and do the thing they used to be good at — it probably makes more sense than keeping them as management,” Lambros said.
Other companies are rethinking the managers’ jobs, too.
The HR and payroll platform Deel used to aim for eight to 10 employees per manager. Now it targets 12 to 15, cofounder and CEO Alex Bouaziz said, because AI can handle some of the administrative work that once limited team sizes.
At the same time, he said, the company tends to ask managers to act as player-coaches so that leaders stay connected to customers, its product, and how the company functions.
That approach also helps strip away what he sees as unnecessary layers.
“Managers of managers, to me, is a role that’s meant to disappear, and I think AI is accelerating that,” Bouaziz said.
Yet it’s possible to make managers’ teams too big, he said. Giving a manager 20 to 30 direct reports is effectively saying “We don’t really want any interactions between the manager and the ICs, and we just want them to run,” Bouaziz said, referring to individual contributors.
He said that investing time in employees’ development can help prepare the next generation of leaders.
Ultimately, the payoff is there, Bouaziz said. The best “leaders of tomorrow are the people you cared for a long time ago,” he said.
‘In-the-trenches feedback’
Scott Stevenson, cofounder and CEO of Spellbook, which develops an AI tool for drafting and analyzing contracts, said that managers are increasingly folding career development into the work itself.
“It’s a lot less formal and a lot more just on-the-fly, in-the-trenches feedback because everything is very fast-moving now,” he said.
Stevenson said he hears from colleagues across tech that one-on-one meetings between managers and workers are among the first things to get axed in a week when someone wants an extra 30 to 60 minutes to “keep up with the fire hose.”
“I still think they’re important. I still think in-person time one-on-one is not something you can ever fully replace,” Stevenson said. “It’s less frequent now, though.”
The pace of work in tech has left many people in the industry feeling “disoriented and unsure,” he said. “Everyone is just doing a lot of work, and it’s like, ‘Well, where am I going?'”
To help guard against discussion about career growth getting lost entirely, Spellbook conducts annual and midyear reviews of its employees, Stevenson said. That allows for “really deep conversation” about workers’ careers and how to level up and advance, he said.
Beyond regular reviews, Kosowski, the engineer manager, recommends that workers bring up career development with their managers and “fight for that time.”
Has your manager had less time for career conversations? Or, are you a manager juggling a heavier workload? Share your experience in the comments below.
