Brian Armstrong sent a memo to Coinbase employees this week. Fourteen percent reduction. Flatter org. Smaller teams.
And this line:
"No pure managers. Every leader must also be a strong and active individual contributor."
Nikhyl Singhal said it on a podcast I listened to last week: "If you don't love building stuff, you are in trouble."
I've had that thought on my homepage for years: "If you have never been a software developer, you have no business managing software developers."
In all the AI hype that is being published, here's what nobody is saying out loud: you can't be an individual contributor if you've never created anything in the first dang place.
I once worked for a director who had never written a line of code in their life. Sharp person. Understood budgets, headcount, org structure. But they could not see the work. When a developer spent two days going down a rabbit hole that turned out to be a dead end, all they saw was two wasted days. What they could not see was that sometimes that's just how you find the right answer. AI doesn't change that, because that's a judgement call and judgement is what humans bring to the table. AI just lets us run down that rabbit hole at 10x speed and back out even faster.
Software is not factory work. You cannot manage it like it is. AI just makes the gap between those who understand it and those who don't impossible to hide.
Yes, the lights just came on. And some people really don't like what got illuminated.
Originally posted on LinkedIn: "The Lights Just Came On"