It’s probably the worst time to be technical manager or an engineering manager.
Don’t get me wrong, good EMs are probably 100x engineers at this day, because their day job was to always command a fleet of humans to write code. Now those humans are replaced by agents.
It’s a bad time because of two concrete reasons:
Firstly, the amount of code that you have to maintain, review, vet has grown multi-fold and EMs are crumbling under the pressure of the load. Burnt out is common, and explaining your life to anyone else feels alien.
Secondly, your counterparts - non technical managers and execs have their expectations set sky high. They want everything to be done this sprint.
So one one side you are dealing with a magnitude increase in code and on the other side you are dealing wit a magnitude increase in expectations.
And then there is the self imposed expectation that you need to be on top of the AI curve.
No wonder most CTOs/EMs/TMs are preferring becoming MTS at Anthropic/OpenAI rather than continuing - yes, money is one reason but CTOs are paid well - the majority reason is they no longer want to work a feature factory.
This the first time, you have escape velocity from feature factories.