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A friend of mine runs a mid-sized software shop that went agentic-only six months ago. His current recruiting pitch would have seemed fairly odd two years ago: he’s actively seeking former development managers who haven’t written production code in years to be software developers again.
“I’ve been running engineering teams for 25 years,” he told me, “and I’ve started focusing my hiring on managers instead of developers. Managers adapt immediately — they’re already used to orchestrating work without doing it themselves, so there are no habits to unlearn [with agentic AI]. They come back within a week saying ‘this is completely different from anything I’ve done before.’”
This sounds kinda crazy. The conventional wisdom is clear: development management is a fine livelihood, but development itself requires continuous improvement to keep abreast of a changing technology landscape, and anyone who stopped coding “fell behind.” The further you got from the codebase, the more your skills atrophied. Technical leadership meant staying technical, and if you let that slip, you were just another guy who used to know things.
The conventional wisdom is wrong. Or rather, it was right for an era that ended about five months ago. Do try to keep up.
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