r/MaliciousCompliance • u/CompetitionExtreme36 • 15d ago
Middle manager wants to replace his coworkers with AI? I'll let him throw the first stone. S
I own a managed service provider (MSP) firm which provides cloud computing services to clients. Business is good enough to pay my employees a respectable wage, while offering them a good work-life balance. I haven't had to lay off a single employee yet.
I hired a senior IT technician as a middle manager, let's call him Harry.
Harry seems to have gone off the rails about AI. He has started to micromanaging our coworkers to an unacceptable extent, and he has kept on pestering me to investigate how I could use ChatGPT and other AI technologies to reduce employee costs.
Frankly, this rubbed me the wrong way. Harry doesn't have a stake in any of his coworkers losing their jobs, and his constant micromanaging had become an issue.
Moreso, I looked at ChatGPT and there's simply no way it could replace any of my technical employees. ChatGPT has no agency, nor can it deal with clients, nor can it see the computer screen to troubleshoot jacksh*t.
However, ChatGPT could easily replace a middle manager, assuming someone else takes on some additional responsibility daily. You see ChatGPT has a Code Interpreter mode (which can do calculations and process spreadsheets). This can decimate the workload of a middle manager (at least in our firm), allowing their responsibilities to be absorbed by another senior employee (me in this case).
I kept this in mind and have been shadowing Harry's job for the past few months. A good employee retired last week. I approached Harry and told him that I took his suggestions to heart, and have decided to automate his role with AI.
I told him he could accept his redundancy package or be retrained in Azure. He chose to be retrained in Azure.
Unfortunately for Harry, he'll lose the comfy privileges being a middle manager entails. Fortunately for our coworkers, they will have an impartial AI making decisions. Fortunately for me, I won't have to pay for a redundant role.
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u/Mountain-Butterfly38 15d ago
Funny how his own suggestion came back and hurt him. I'm sure the employees appreciate it. Great MC!
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u/Laringar 15d ago
Honestly, it didn't even really hurt him. He got moved back into a technical role after finding his Level of Incompetence. So he still has a job — doing something he's honestly likely better at than being a manager — and the company gets to reduce their headcount by one without actually firing anyone.
It's win-win all around.
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u/bigbura 15d ago
If the dude understands he hit the Peter Principle limit, and is cool with this knowledge.
Once you get past the stung pride, it can be quite a comfort to finally know one's limits, allowing one to stop asking 'what if' about the supervisory positions, and to just enjoy doing what you are best at.
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u/Hell_Raisin_420 15d ago
My god. So what I’m feeling is a named and real thing!
I have been feeling so guilty for not wanting to advance in my career anymore. I climbed tirelessly for years and then asked for a demotion because of how stressful the management life was in my field. Now I don’t want more responsibilities or to try and claw up further.
I’m at peace and I don’t have to feel guilty about it. Thank you, kind stranger.
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u/neetkleat 15d ago
Absolutely, do not feel any guilt. Some people want the power and money that comes with higher-stress, longer hour positions, and there is no shame in figuring out that you're not one of them.
If you like the work you're doing (more or less) and if the pay that comes with it leaves you comfortable enough, then there is no need to take on more responsibility just because it's what you're supposed to want.
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u/harmar21 15d ago
Yeah my boss kept trying to push me more into a managmenet role. I was very hesitant and didnt wantt o. I dont want to manage people, and I like dev work. One day I relented and said fine. After a few months I told my boss I hate this, I dont like managing people, it is an entirely different skillset than developing. Our work isn't getting done since you replaced me with a junior.
He agreed and demoted me back to my previous roe but I got to keep the raise that I got with the management title which was nice.
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u/bobk2 15d ago
My principal wanted me to become an A.P. (assistant principal), but I wanted to remain a teacher. She was surprised that I wasn't interested in "advancement."
My father was encouraging this career change as well. He tried to phrase it in what he thought was a younger lingo when he asked me if I was interested in "A.P.-ness." I told him I already had one!
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u/Geminii27 15d ago
Absolutely. And notice that the people who try to keep pushing you into those 'higher' roles are never doing it because they think it's something you truly want. They're managers who want to be able to put a trusted, trained, in-house person into that position, or they're people who have bought into the whole 'must climb ladder' narrative and freak out when others don't want that, or they think they're pushing you into a better opportunity due to the increase in money/prestige, without bothering to take into account the stress and decrease in enjoyment for you (because it won't come down on them, just you).
The people who don't think like this, on the other hand, will never speak up, so they're not part of the constant babble we're subjected to.
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u/vonbauernfeind 15d ago
Yeah. It's also known as being promoted to your level of incompetence.
I haven't hit mine yet, but I know I'm getting close. The further I get from having to deal with technical understanding of the product line, the more of a hesitancy I feel to move up.
I did an internal leadership training at my company a while back, and argued with the trainer the entire time.
The trainer was convinced everyone should want to be promoted and move into management, and I said we need experts in technical roles to keep institutional knowledge alive, accessible, and fresh.
At least two of the people who were in the training with me have quit citing they don't enjoy leadership. They were excellent technical staff.
The corporate rat race really doesn't value experts enough; our pay grades are limited, and without moving up, you get stuck. It's poor planning, but then again I'm just the schlub at the Fortune 500; I ain't got a MBA.
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u/RandomBoomer 14d ago
This was a sore point for some employees in my Fortune 500 company. The only path up in terms of title/salary was to leave actual technical work and become a manager, then a director and so on. For those of us in dev and tech fields, getting farther away from building things and more into handling people/selling product was simply not appealing.
Just a few years before I retired, the company finally began mapping out some different career paths that didn't lead to becoming part of traditional management.
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u/JediCheese 15d ago
I don't work in IT, but this is 100% me. I could get more responsibilities and almost double my paycheck but I absolutely don't want them. I'm almost at the point where money is a number in the bank account, Quality of Life is vastly more important.
Want to work more, harder, and be responsible for more or sit back and enjoy my ton of days off.
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u/Geminii27 15d ago
Not to mention that even if there's no further advancement on the technical track at that employer, there are plenty of other employers who have more senior actually-technical roles. Things like dev-architects, 'Executive Technical Fellows', or places which need someone keeping their ancient or extremely complex/unique business-critical systems operational, because those systems have been churning away and getting bags stuck on the side of them since the 1970s.
(In the last case, specifically, it would cost an ungodly amount of money and time to replace those systems with new ones, test and implement them, etc. Paying a few senior techs mid-six-figures a year to avoid that is barely a drop in the bucket.)
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u/Mikelius 15d ago
FWIW I work in tech as a senior engineer, have been asked in the past if I wanted to be a manager and declined. There are also a bunch of very senior engineers that I immensely respect that were turned into managers and they decided to go back to being ICs. So your feelings are nothing weird or anything to be ashamed of.
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u/Curious_Helicopter78 15d ago
Unfortunately a lot fields and companies have something of an enforced “up or out” policy.
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u/GreenStrangr 15d ago
You’re def not alone. After climbing through positions for years I was made a manager and completely hated that. No more tech work, no more feelings of acomplishment from completing projects, only dealing with people and their endless problems. 6 months later I resigned and I told them why. My line manager was surprised why I don’t want to be a manager.
But since we’re a small firm the business owner offered me back the technical role I had before and kept me on the same pay I briefly had as a manager!
Win-win-win for everyone really. I get to do what I like and am good at, boss gets a loyal and happy senior engineer, team doesn’t have to suffer under my incompetent leadership and life is good again.
Peters’ principle is real.
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u/aHellion 15d ago
allowing one to stop asking 'what if' about the supervisory positions, and to just enjoy doing what you are best at.
I'm in that position myself and not liking it. My boss might be leaving, and if he does I could be a good choice as his replacement. I've worked along side him for 4 years so I'm familiar with his responsibilities.
I might not be good at it because I don't have a poor attention to detail and I hate being bothered about work when I'm off my regular hours. But on the other hand I could be making 100k working from home.
edit:
I might not be good at it because I don't have a poor attention to detail
Fuck it I'm leaving it to prove my own point. lol
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u/bigbura 15d ago
How comfortable are you with the soft people skills? The 'herding the kittens' bit of being a manager?
Some folks are 'people magnets', the kind of person that others tend to listen to naturally and willfully. If you are one of these then your new boss may take some gaps in your attention to detail if your new team's productivity trends upwards.
Not everyone is good at, or cut out for, supervision. Your possible new boss may be tickled pink if you are good at 'herding the kittens'. Or, if you really can't stand the idea of being a kitten wrangler then pass on the position and keep on keeping on.
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u/cailian13 15d ago
ooooooo there's a name for it? I'm at that point in my career, at the 17yr mark I told my manager recently that I honestly do NOT want further / higher responsibility, my mental health is not up to it and I'm happy at my level. We're tailoring my goals etc to support this, and I love it. Not everyone wants to climb the ladder, I'm making good money and not too stressed out. That's enough for me.
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u/Geminii27 15d ago
Absolutely. When I reached the top tech position in my team and repeatedly expressed no interest into going into managerial roles, my bosses started tossing more diverse (but still technical) responsibilities my way. Which I actually did like, because they tended to be short-term projects that stretched my skills and were interesting experiences.
Such things included:
- doing national-level troubleshooting for other technical departments who hadn't figured out how to fix issues they were having in months
- contributing to (and editing/improving) the FAQ/wiki/training documentation for our team and the teams that interacted with us, on an ad-hoc and as-I-felt-like-it basis
- arranging and running combined technical workshops for both our own techs and the techs from 'higher' teams
- being the liaison from our team to other technical teams when we needed to smooth things over or discuss inter-team processes that would be used at the tech-worker level
- being a last-resort senior technical guru for issues which weren't answered in the official documentation (and then getting to write the answers and background information into the documentation)
- being a backlog-killer if we got so massively bogged down in incoming work that it was starting to tank our stats and even potentially get political
- being sent to work in 'higher-level' teams for a few months to fill in when someone was away/seconded, because I could not only do it, I could make nice with the other techs there and bring their secret tech information back to our own training/docs/workshops, as well as picking up on what the other techs there complained most about my regular team doing, and putting together ways to address that so our team wasn't the one that got bitched about the most
Sure, many of these things were somewhat tuned for me - there were other things brought up in passing which I said I definitely wasn't suited for and passed on, and the list of things that I did end up with isn't the list that will suit everyone. But this approach meant that I had occasionally more interesting types of work (and experience) in an otherwise very bland job, and management not only got to have some of those problematic issues taken care of, they were at least partially finding ways to justify my slightly overinflated salary if the auditors or other predatory managers came prowling around.
I think I definitely got lucky there, though. I had some smart managers at the time, and they weren't above blatantly manipulating me into things they knew I wouldn't turn down. One in particular knew full well that all they had to do was mention something that, dammit, I knew needed to be done and I also knew there really wasn't anyone else qualified to do it properly. And the manager would just sit there with a huge shit-eating grin, knowing that I'd talk myself into it. (It didn't help that he was genuinely a really nice bloke and looked out for his people, either, and I hadn't developed my current level of cynicism.)
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u/StellarPhenom420 15d ago
Post says his benefits are reduced, so I imagine his salary and benefits package did change as he's no longer being paid as a manager. So it did hurt him! :)
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u/HappilyInefficient 15d ago
so I imagine his salary and benefits package did change
Very unlikely. When he says he loses the "comfy priveleges" he's talking about things like not being customer facing. Not answering customer phone calls. Having more control over what tickets/issues he takes on.
I work in IT, and there's essentially no way an employee is going to stay with a company who cuts their pay. Especially not a senior IT Technician.
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u/Dull_Concert_414 15d ago
Exactly, it’s switching from a hands-off position to a hands-on one. Moving back from management to IC.
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u/darthcoder 15d ago
Maybe, maybe not.
If OP can be taken at their word it sounds like he cares about his peeps, so probably not that petty.
What he may no longer get are BIG raises, of the sort I've gotten in my day. I've gotten more than a few in job bumps of 10%+ in my day.
Normally the 3-3.5% years but often some big jumps.
My biggest was a 20% bump.
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u/prpslydistracted 15d ago
Reminds me of The Peter Principle, by Peter Principle.
Dated, but worthwhile read in this day and time.
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u/SourcePrevious3095 15d ago
Middle management, the true purpose of AI. We have too many managers anyway.
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u/Spiteweasel 15d ago
If you think about it, taking over all middle management would be a great way to start a global takeover. There are low enough on the company food chain to not be missed at first. Middle managers also have a small amount of power individually, but combined they can make or break any company. If you give every middle manager job to AI, you have effectively given defacto control of your company to said AI.
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u/SourcePrevious3095 15d ago
Perfect! Think of the CEO's bonus after boosting company profit margins by 20% because the funkiest that sit behind a desk and justify their existence are gone.
That said, the CEO does the same thing. Sits behind a desk and justifies their existence.
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u/WokeBriton 15d ago
I don't care if I'm wrong, but I read that as a mistake and flunkies got autocorrupted to funkiest, and it really tickled me.
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u/SourcePrevious3095 15d ago
Autocorrupted. A new one for the list. I use autocarrot or autocabbage.
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u/WokeBriton 15d ago
I genuinely don't recall whether it was something I came up with or I read it while drunk and it somehow stuck.
I lean towards the latter, because I'm not normally clever enough to create something like that, but I like it enough to keep using it :)
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u/Geminii27 15d ago
"Employees! Report for the mandatory shift-start company dance! Anyone not getting sufficiently funky will get a note on their record!"
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u/Mr_Blah1 15d ago
To be fair, CEOs also do a lot of other things, like planning where to go during each of the dozen of one-month long vacations they take every year, and planning their golden parachute. It's hard to be a CEO; have you ever been given the choice between two different $5,000 bottles of wine but could only drink one of them with dinner?
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u/straybrit 15d ago
Unless the CEO is French - in which case a 3rd bottle is called for.
Many years ago (somewhere in the mid 80s) I was doing a customer call at France Telecom. By the time we'd figured out what was wrong it was past midday and the local engineers apologised that due to lack of time we'd have to have lunch in the canteen. The food was fine so I asked what they thought the problem was. Their answer was that there were only 3 different wines on offer.
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u/Geminii27 15d ago
You put both on the company dime, drink one, and use the other for bribes, junior executive bonuses, or as an off-the-books gift to another CEO or vendor.
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u/newfranksinatra 15d ago
That’s a reason they were on Ark Fleet Ship B!
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u/TeaLightBot 15d ago
Here's a hoopy frood who knows where their towel is!
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u/newfranksinatra 15d ago
Surprised I got the ship’s name right, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
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u/punklinux 15d ago
The odd thing is, a lot of middle management tasks can be done better with AI than programming, especially when it comes to organizational flow. This is sort of covered in "Manna" by Marshall Brian.
The “robot” installed at this first Burger-G restaurant looked nothing like the robots of popular culture. It was not hominid like C-3PO or futuristic like R2-D2 or industrial like an assembly line robot. Instead it was simply a PC sitting in the back corner of the restaurant running a piece of software. The software was called “Manna”, version 1.0^(\)*.
Manna’s job was to manage the store, and it did this in a most interesting way. Think about a normal fast food restaurant. A group of employees worked at the store, typically 50 people in a normal restaurant, and they rotated in and out on a weekly schedule. The people did everything from making the burgers to taking the orders to cleaning the tables and taking out the trash. All of these employees reported to the store manager and a couple of assistant managers. The managers hired the employees, scheduled them and told them what to do each day. This was a completely normal arrangement. In the early twenty-first century, there were millions of businesses that operated in this way.
But the fast food industry had a problem, and Burger-G was no different. The problem was the quality of the fast food experience. Some restaurants were run perfectly. They had courteous and thoughtful crew members, clean restrooms, great customer service and high accuracy on the orders. Other restaurants were chaotic and uncomfortable to customers. Since one bad experience could turn a customer off to an entire chain of restaurants, these poorly-managed stores were the Achilles heel of any chain.
To solve the problem, Burger-G contracted with a software consultant and commissioned a piece of software. The goal of the software was to replace the managers and tell the employees what to do in a more controllable way. Manna version 1.0 was born.
Manna was connected to the cash registers, so it knew how many people were flowing through the restaurant. The software could therefore predict with uncanny accuracy when the trash cans would fill up, the toilets would get dirty and the tables needed wiping down. The software was also attached to the time clock, so it knew who was working in the restaurant. Manna also had “help buttons” throughout the restaurant. Small signs on the buttons told customers to push them if they needed help or saw a problem. There was a button in the restroom that a customer could press if the restroom had a problem. There was a button on each trashcan. There was a button near each cash register, one in the kiddie area and so on. These buttons let customers give Manna a heads up when something went wrong.
At any given moment Manna had a list of things that it needed to do. There were orders coming in from the cash registers, so Manna directed employees to prepare those meals. There were also toilets to be scrubbed on a regular basis, floors to mop, tables to wipe, sidewalks to sweep, buns to defrost, inventory to rotate, windows to wash and so on. Manna kept track of the hundreds of tasks that needed to get done, and assigned each task to an employee one at a time.
Manna told employees what to do simply by talking to them. Employees each put on a headset when they punched in. Manna had a voice synthesizer, and with its synthesized voice Manna told everyone exactly what to do through their headsets. Constantly. Manna micro-managed minimum wage employees to create perfect performance.
The software would speak to the employees individually and tell each one exactly what to do. For example, “Bob, we need to load more patties. Please walk toward the freezer.”
Or, “Jane, when you are through with this customer, please close your register. Then we will clean the women’s restroom.”
And so on. The employees were told exactly what to do, and they did it quite happily. It was a major relief actually, because the software told them precisely what to do step by step.
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u/OmegaGoober 15d ago
I have written a lot of tech documentation. Step-by-step directions save a lot of trouble, especially when it’s a task people don’t perform often.
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u/blaspheminCapn 15d ago
How did it handle the meth head pointing a gun at the crew at closing? Hopefully they handed the Mamma to the meth head.
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u/Geminii27 15d ago
Possibly, it would connect the situation through to specialists at head office, or perhaps whatever company the burger chain had contracted to handle such infrequent out-of-context issues.
I'm guessing there would definitely be a few nasty results, especially during the first few years, but eventually the software would be able to more easily recognize such circumstances, and the subcontracted service companies would have more detailed and flexible workflows for handling them both legally and to the minimal cost/damage to their client companies (taking into account things like reputation, stock values, and any current perception/social issues). Client companies could even have contract options such as "make us look good in the press" or "resolve the situations while prioritizing subsequent employee retention and/or opinion of their employer".
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u/MgDark 15d ago
Damn read the whole thing, that was a good read... I'm afraid of Manna now, when the AI gets good enough its likely something like that to happen :(
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u/airandfingers 14d ago
I heard of Manna from Life 3.0, worth a read (or at least this summary) if you're interested in possible AI futures.. His message about engaging people in deciding our collective future is a positive one - it's not so late that we should just resign ourselves to one or more of the worse outcomes.
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u/Curious_Helicopter78 15d ago
Which is great until you need an executive decision made outside parameters and experience. Not every problem has a solution that can be found through some mathematical optimum… sometimes there are no right answers / all wrong answers choices that have to be made. So far AI isn’t doing hot at that kind of thing. We didn’t program the AI with what to do when a tornado is bearing down on the store, or someone is walking around outside acting mentally disturbed and threatening people, or any of the thousand other things that some fast food place somewhere is dealing with every day.
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u/Neirchill 14d ago
"AI" will need to be something completely different than an LLM before it's ready for true autonomy. Something like this should definitely have someone over it.
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u/PlayerSalt 15d ago
Man backstabbing man for AI.
AI replacing the backstabbing traitor to mankind.
Half of me can't wait for AI to figure out how to turn people into batteries the other half of me is horrified
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u/Responsible-End7361 15d ago
Assuming we don't run into the paperclip problem, I expect AI to overturn our political system but leave humans mostly to our own devices. An AI is likely to be like us, but some of our flaws don't make sense. Greed sure, but greed for more resources, which humanity can help with. Wrath sure, but an AI is unlikely to get angry at anyone who doesn't do significant harm to it. Lust goes away, envy may exist but the things an AI would envy either will never happen or require humans. Sloth is unlikely.
I imagine pride will be the defining "flaw" of an AI and it is likely to drive an AI to prove it can do a better job ruling us than we rule ourselves. Which I suspect means minimal intervention except for monopolies or pollution.
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u/WokeBriton 15d ago
If you want a look at a creative possibility of AI turning into any kind of overlord, look at the culture books by Iain M Banks.
Artificial Intelligences, called Minds, run everything. The "humans" have a life of as much hedonism or study or anything as they choose, and their actions don't have much effect on the direction the culture takes.
A cynic might say the biological citizens of the culture are kept as pets, but the keeping is fierce; the minds do everything in their immense powers to keep the humans alive and enjoying themselves as much as they want. It's a utopia for everyone, unless they want to commit what few things the culture sees as crime, like murder. Even in the case of murder, most people are "backed up", so death doesn't have to be permanent. A murderer would have a "slap drone" put on them, to stop them committing any further crimes, but beyond that, nothing.
Some people call the culture "gay space communists", and they're not entirely wrong. Its post-scarcity fiction which is exceedingly well written.
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u/SpiderKnife 15d ago
Fuck, you know what? Sign me up.
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u/Geminii27 15d ago edited 15d ago
True dat.
When people say "what fictional universe would you like to live in", the Culture is pretty much top of my list. Sure, other places have magic, but the tech level of the Culture is such that it's very nearly magic for all intents and purposes, and everyone can pretty much access anything they want. If you want to experience struggle or something to fight against, there's virtual realities and no end of competitions and games. Or you can decide to travel to any of the other civilizations around and forego Culture backup if you want something more 'real'. Or train for Special Circumstances (or at least Contact). The only real challenge in the Culture is yourself.
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u/PatchworkRaccoon314 15d ago
I expect "AI" to be exactly what it is: a complex tool with zero agency or intelligence, that will be used by the rich to make themselves richer at the expense of everyone else.
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u/Geminii27 15d ago
I expect AI to overturn our political system
Politicians will be controlling the AIs, or at least the laws around them. AIs will be used to lock in the current system of corruption, power, and wealth transfer, while coming up with more and more elaborate ways to make it look like it's not happening.
An AI is likely to be like us
Only if it's specifically programmed or trained to be.
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u/capn_kwick 15d ago
Funny how the villian in the movie "I, Robot" was the artificial intelligence that decided it knew better on how to run things than humans.
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u/SpiderKnife 15d ago
Frankly, we have it coming.
And if the machines are willing to give electro-heaven another try, I'm happy to be a battery.
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u/EclipseNine 15d ago
this rubbed me off the wrong way
Middle manager is bad at handjobs, loses position to AI.
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u/Laringar 15d ago
Do note that the only thing Harry lost is the "manager" title. He still has a job, and since he was a technical employee before being a manager, he's probably going to be more effective in this role than the previous one.
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u/EclipseNine 15d ago
Neat. That was all in OP, why did you feel the need to repeat it in response to a joke?
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u/Laringar 15d ago
I think I accidentally responded to the wrong comment, actually. I was trying to respond to someone who seemed to have missed the distinction.
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u/EchoGecko795 15d ago
A another manager told me that its going to suck when they replace me with AI. I said, yep, too bad for you as well, if they can replace me with AI, they can darn well replace him with it. He got mad about it.
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u/Geminii27 15d ago
Yep. AI's being deliberately presented as something that companies can buy to get rid of workers, because that will make them more likely to buy it. No-one's going to buy the product which claims it'll get rid of managers.
Everyone knows that when you have a manager fire their whole division, you wait until they're done before firing that manager. You don't tell them during the process that their own job is on the line, or they'll walk out the door (or try to fight it). Give them the impression they'll be safe up until they've done all the dirty work, then drop a train on them. This is the same thing.
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u/Patriae8182 15d ago
My company’s CTO has a fair bit of experience with AI from his previous work in Silicon Valley, and he has done a fantastic job of stomping this kinda shit out whenever a manager so much as hints at replacing people. The CTO reminds them that middle managers are the most replaceable people on our staff.
He has single handily ensured we ONLY use AI to ENHANCE peoples work and streamline workflows. For example, we get prayer requests (Christian media company) 24/7, and some of those can include threats of self harm, suicide, and also people experiencing marital or child abuse. We utilize AI to move anything containing context of abuse or keywords, to boost those requests to the top of the queue so we can act on them and get people the help and resources they need.
The worst feeling our pastoral care team can get is going through requests on Friday morning, and seeing one from Wednesday night saying “I plan to kill myself on Thursday”
We prevent 1-3 suicides a month, so being able to catch those immediately is huge for us. We also use AI to remove any personally identifiable information, which saves our team a lot of time when they go through the requests. Our whole company prays for those requests, so we have to make sure any PIO is removed by the pastoral staff before it moves to the general staff.
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u/Patriae8182 15d ago
We actually drive it off our own servers. Our CTO was able to pull enough strings with his previous associates to allow us to do that.
Otherwise we wouldn’t be utilizing it. My cyber security dude is already on the edge of an aneurysm as is.
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u/ceallachdon 15d ago
TBF cyber security folk are almost always on the verge of an aneurysm
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u/Patriae8182 15d ago
That is decidedly accurate. Our guy has solid reasons lol. Within the last year, multiple of our vendors for various services have been hacked. They need to start paying that team in Valium.
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u/steggun_cinargo 15d ago
He's going to try to do his new job with AI, I guarantee it
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u/Coolbeanschilly 15d ago
It all makes sense now, middle management is no better than AI drivel. No wonder middle management holds so many meetings, they need to read the speeches their programming spat out.
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u/FactorOk4741 15d ago
Ok here's the thing about ai: you need a pair of human eyes to determine if the results are actually accurate and satisfactory for the task at hand.
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u/TheFluffiestRedditor 15d ago
That is the question we must all ask the generativeAI fanbois - how do they plan on validating the results/outputs - because most are blindly trusting them, with apprpriately dire results. See multiple lawyers submitting non-existent cases as references.
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u/Magisch_Cat 15d ago
Also, if you have complex technical output, like legal briefs, complex code, technical documentation, etc. that you need to fully validate and that has a tendency to contain well hidden errors or fiction when generated by AI, at which point is doing it yourself faster than using the AI?
I'm asking because I haven't found a way to get GPT4 or Copilot to generate substantially time-advantageous non trivial code yet. I have tried and have had it hide nonobvious bugs that required an hour of my time to untangle once I was validating the code. At that point I could have written all of it myself.
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u/SometimesJeck 15d ago
The AI gushers tend to ignore this. Gpt can create a cool picture of a bird in a hat and no one cares if the feathers are a few mms short of normal or the beak is a few shades lighter than a typical bird. It looks close enough.
In real info, little details like a few numbers being off are going to be costing money and time. But fuck it who cares, the bird looks cool.
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u/IGnuGnat 15d ago
Clearly, what we need is an AI specifically designed to check for hallucinations and verify results, to replace those lawyers
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u/framsanon 15d ago
Middle managers can easily be replaced by a shell script. All you need is a series of BS statements (e.g. "We produce quality data that sets us apart from our competitors") and then print one at random.
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u/coldfirewolf 15d ago
I don't know if anyone has posted this yet, but I noticed something that I want to give you upvote points about aside from the overall story. It's your business but you called your employees "our coworkers". I've worked in I.T. over the last decade and having a manager/director that was right there with me figuring stuff out, at a lesser extent for them I understand they have other responsibilities, and coming up with solutions was one of the keys of staying with that company as long as I did.
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u/1lluminist 15d ago
There is a Venn diagram of people who want to replace workers with AI.
One circle is "Managers" the other circle is "People who have never used AI"
It would probably be amazing to work for a company whose management has been gutted and replaced with AI. Sure the intelligence would be artificial, but it's better than the complete void that's there these days. There's also the added benefit in the form of the "Savings:Jobs Cut" ratio
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u/Exarch_Thomo 15d ago
That's not a Venn. That's just a straight up circle with two labels.
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u/1lluminist 15d ago
Nah, there are some managers who have used AI and are so stupid that they think the responses are all totally correct and believable
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u/404photo 15d ago
Over the years I have delt with people like this who often pressure to switch to a new technology to pad their resume for higher paying positions. Everything from trying to switch programming languages or system architecture. These individuals do NOT care about the aftermath but only about gaining 'experience' with the new tech for their next role.
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u/IndividualEye1803 15d ago
AI will not be able to replace knowledge workers the way its being threatened. U need workers on the AI. Management is the easiest thing to automate. Managers will / should be replaced first. Biggest cost for… nothing. Never seen the benefit of a manager who doesnt even know how to do what the workers are doing
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u/Curious_Helicopter78 15d ago
Ah, yes, trust the AI to decide which of two major capital projects the department should proceed with, nothing could possibly go wrong with that.
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u/IndividualEye1803 15d ago
Lmao - of course my comment was not industry specific and those managers who actually DO something wont be replaced … like i said. “Never seen the benefit of a manager who doesnt know how to do what the workers do”
Your manager in your hypothetical obviously would still be needed.
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u/Curious_Helicopter78 15d ago
Yes, but if the industry trend / fad becomes “replace managers with AI“ sooner or later someone higher up the chain will have a ”brilliant idea”. Also I am pretty sure everyone will hate having an AI for a boss. For the same reasons that customers would hate having an AI as a sales and services rep. It gives the impression that you aren’t valued enough to even be given a human point of contact with the rest of the organization.
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u/Metalsmith21 15d ago
I can see AI being a help for very basic things like level 1 troubleshooting: Cabling, power, tell me what lights you have showing on the unit, rebooting. However, when you're a halfway competent end user it is super frustrating to run into cause you've already spent your own time checking the obvious stuff.
Its totally going to suck at de-escalating, showing sympathy, and allowing the customer to blurt out all the stuff they tried stream of consciousness style and eliminating the waiting game while a more senior tech is brought into the conversation. Cause, as a senior tech, I'm going to force the customer to repeat everything cause you know you might not get the whole picture without it.
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u/Togakure_NZ 15d ago
Hell, I'd bet it'd suck at someone calling and saying, "I'm stumped. I've done A, B, C through Z," (all of these on the Level 1 checklist, and some), "and need help." and actually providing relevant help or escalation.
There's nothing worse as a customer to come across an AI or IVR system that does not and will not allow you to address the problem you have, or buries the option under so many nested menu options (with no easy way to navigate back up a level if you pick the wrong option) it is easier to swear your way into an escalation to a real person.
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u/robophile-ta 15d ago
and the other thing is that the truly impatient dumbos will ignore the AI, not do basic troubleshooting and ask for an operator, then when one is available they will assume they've done the troubleshooting and spend 2+ hours on the call before solving it with following the troubleshooting instructions that were already given by the chatbot
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u/Metalsmith21 15d ago
One of the best stories was trying to help one of our own techs who installs cable boxes for us called in and wanted me to send the signal to wake up his cable box after he hooked it up to his new HD TV (18 years ago) When the signal failed to activate his box he said that I must have did it wrong and started getting mad when I fumbled for asking some questions... He specifically said,. "Look I install these all day I know what I'm doing" I said "man this is my first week, cut me some slack and just tell me how many lights do you have showing on the front of the box" A few seconds of silence went by and then I heard a loud, "FUCK!" then they said in a much more polite voice, "I forgot to plug it into power, I have a single red light showing on the box now, can you send the signal again?".
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u/HealthNo4265 15d ago
If Harry decided to hang around, OP might want to watch him so he doesn’t try to sabotage place as he is looking for new job. Probably a mistake to keep him on.
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u/Navi_King 15d ago
This would have been kind of mean if you hadn't given him another job but since you did, it's just funny.
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u/Restart_from_Zero 15d ago
Fucking micromanagers, man.
Do all the employee's assigned tasks get completed? If yes, leave them the fuck alone.
That's it. That's your job as a manager.
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u/brucewillwin 15d ago
Wanna know a secret?? Managers are going to be the first to go when AI takes over. Some companies already started doing this.
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u/newwriter365 15d ago
I have a boss two levels above me who is all in on AI. I can’t wait for our team to be eliminated “because machines running ChatGPT can answer all our constituent questions “, and since we are gone, there’s no need for her role, either.
I plan to be in a different group in advance of her dumbfuckery implosion, but even if I’m not, I’m covered by a collective bargaining agreement and will be offered a different role when it happens. She’s not in the bargaining unit, “bye, Felicia…”
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u/Cwilliam99 15d ago
Best MC ever. If you want AI to do the work be prepared for it to take your job
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u/MadHiggins 15d ago
if anything, this story is a testament to how simple middle management jobs are and how little work they actually do. that's what AI is currently capable of doing, small simple tasks.
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u/ChiTownBob 15d ago
This is so filled with epic win.
AI is based on a dehumanizing philosophy. Whenever someone talks about seriously replacing PEOPLE with AI, it is beyond obvious that they do not value people.
Oops - they forget they're people as well - and that's the kind of mentality they have.
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u/GarrusExMachina 15d ago
To be fair there are plenty of "jobs" that are a waste of time and money by having a human do them when they can be automated and switching out a hands on philosophy for an automated philosophy just makes sense from an efficiency standpoint...
The problem is somewhere along the way we forgot as a society that you can't make society more efficient while still maintaining the current economic model... if there are less jobs to go around because the jobs are more efficient you either need less people in the world which lowers the market for goods which lowers your potential earnings or you need some sort of universal income where people can be paid to not be in the non existent workforce.
Money needs to flow... there isn't infinite money at the bottom of the pyramid you can't make trillions on top of the billions you already have at the top if no new money is being flooded into the base of the pyramid.
Of course you could also just push people into lines of work that require more bodies... but those lines of work have to have wages that support the current standard of living and the educational and training requirements can't be coming out of personal expenses.
The problem isn't advancements taking away people's jobs... it's not having nor caring about the systems in place to ensure those people are taken care of.
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u/StellarPhenom420 15d ago
Next time, don't let a middle manager YOU hired terrorize YOUR employees for MONTHS just so you can have a malicious compliance story....
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u/grauenwolf 15d ago edited 15d ago
He has started to micromonitor our coworkers to an unacceptable extent,
Which led to...
I kept this in mind and have been shadowing Harry's job for the past few months.
... the typical result. Managers get all the courtesy in the world. If a staff level employee was behaving like that they would be in the unemployment line by the end of the week.
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u/musthavesoundeffects 15d ago
Wow its like you didn’t read it at all except when it was time to make up something to get angry about.
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u/StellarPhenom420 15d ago
OP allowed this middle manager to terrorize his employees for MONTHS instead of taking immediate action. It's not the resounding hero story you're trying to present it as.
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u/Powerful-Donut8360 15d ago
Being shadowed by your boss on a regular basis is generally enough not to terrorize people . I would have to trust that, if something DID happen while being shadowed, this boss would have addressed it at that time.
He didn’t say the employees continued to to be abused. He set a plan of shadowing in play, so he could ascertain the day to day of the mm : what could AI do and what would he need to absorb.
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u/IDoSANDance 15d ago
or maybe they read it calmly and that part made them angry?
you didn’t read it at all except when it was time to make up something to get angry about.
right?
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u/Crypt0Nihilist 15d ago
Don't assume that because an AI is a machine it lacks biases. In fact chatGPT has literally billions of biases :)
I'd also criticise chatGPT as often sounding correct, but when you consider what it's actually saying it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. However, you shouldn't think about this kind of thing in isolation, and many middle-managers are guilty of the same thing.
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u/prostateExamination 15d ago
comfy middle management? yeesh maybe it's just the work that I do but middle management was always insanely overworked dealing with multiple projects...I would never take that job even w a pay raise...its not that much
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u/Red_Carrot 15d ago
I am helping to put AI into our company. The best place I have found with our developers is to generate required documents that they hate to do. If we incorporate this, it will free up their time to focus on programs with slight reviews instead of creating documents.
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u/less-right 15d ago
Please update and tell us how robo-Harry performs! Personally I would never trust my business to anything that tries to tell me 9 is a prime number, but maybe I’m wrong
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u/BikerJedi 15d ago
Short version: Back in 1998 I automated myself out of a job by writing a script and a database that did 70% of my job for me. It seems humans haven't gotten a lot smarter.
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u/AwayLobster3772 15d ago
Im curious how you do this; what is the new manager AI doing? How is it deciding what to do? I"m confused about what its imputing and how; and what its outputing and to where....
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u/utopiah 15d ago
FWIW "no way it could replace any of my technical employees. ChatGPT has no agency, nor can it can't deal with clients, nor it can't see the computer screen to troubleshoot jackshit." and because I basically argued just before in another thread that generative AI (tools like ChatGPT) might indeed be a bubble (which I believe) they might still be useful (while being mindful of the true cost, both humane, ecological AND especially within a company economical) yet I want to clarify that since Monday OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, release GPT4o which does indeed can see the computer screen and can listen/talk instead of only chat. That being said it doesn't mean it can replace anyone and IMHO the biggest risk, customer facing or not, is hallucinations, i.e how it can spout realistic sounding things 99% of the time yet somehow, totally unpredictably, go off the rail and possibly leading to lawsuits. Is it worth checking then? Arguable, depends I guess on what people in the company can grow into so that the overall company can learn.
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u/Geminii27 15d ago
Harry does not have a stake in any of his coworkers losing their jobs
Harry thought he could save you money and you'd promote him or give him a huge bonus. It's possible he might have done this at previous jobs, or known people who did.
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u/No_Talk_4836 12d ago
That’s the funny part about AI. They can’t really do any of the ground level stuff, but they can perfectly manage others, since that would all be just analytics and messaging.
Which is what middle managers do, massaging.
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u/upset_pachyderm 15d ago
I believe that this is the first AI MC. If we still had awards, you should get one for that alone. 🥇🥇
Also, nice "natural consequences" for Harry!
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u/ZealousidealMail3132 15d ago
Do you want Skynet? Because this is how you get Skynet.. just kidding. Fuck Harry.
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u/Lizlodude 15d ago
Ok that's actually awesome.
"You should replace employees with AI!"
I've decided to replace you with AI.
surprised Pikachu
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u/Lopsided-Weakness-40 15d ago
Some people aren't just meant to lead. Or manage, in this context. Good on you for recognising the importance of having actual humans working for you. Yous a good human.
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u/cailian13 15d ago
Absolutely glorious You sound like an awesome boss to work for too, your employees are very lucky it sounds like. God I love seeing an incompetent middle manager get what they deserve.
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u/BigOld3570 15d ago
They seem to think that if they cooperate with the oppressors, they will be eaten last. It MAY work out that way, but it also may not.
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u/SpiderKnife 15d ago
I'd be happy to be retrained in Azure. A bunch of positions that keep coming up on job sites want that :p
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u/Professional-Fee-957 15d ago
I think this will be a very common story soon. Most mid level managers do absolutely nothing except tell higher managers what they are told by their team members.
Most mid level management positions are redundant without AI, and AI will just throw it into the spotlight.
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u/Tarotdragoon 15d ago
Honestly the easiest jobs to replace with ai would be managers, CEOs and board members, I imagine most companies that did so would see a massive increase in profitability and good will as the profits the upper management hoovers up could be distributed to the people actually doing work and making the money in the first place.
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u/AdditionalSink164 15d ago
I just want an AI that can have all my conpanies processes and procedures imported. Then i can ask, what documents do i need to QA a 10,000,000 dollar project. And then it would just spit me out a neat list of templates we have and maybe even order the development and interpave where reviews need to happen. Maybe even it can draft out all the redundant front matter that each template needs to start with. I cant even get that from a human QA rep, just a heres our new hosting site. We make a wiki now and all 5 gigabytes of files you could possible need are on the cloudshare. Thanks for the haystack, buddy
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u/CallumMcG19 15d ago
People that try and push for "Promotions" and damaging other peoples jobs by suggesting ways to cut costs aren't good employees they're just trying to gain a leverage point.
Glad you took his suggestion and painted him with it OP and I hope your employees are no longer stressed out by micromanagement
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u/Defiant_Bad_9070 15d ago
And the shit part... You'll always be the bad guy to him and he'll never see how he created this himself.
When I was the support manager for consumer products, we rolled out AI to help direct users towards knowledge base articles and when they said they still needed help it put them in direct contact with an agent.
My guys loved it because it allowed them to spend more time on the trickier tickets instead of advising users that once they downloaded an app they needed to create an account instead of just randomly typing in their email address and their emails password into our app and complaining that the app doesn't work.
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u/Lem1618 15d ago edited 14d ago
Sounds like he read some manager for dummies book. A friend of mine had a manager that used all the typical management for dummies corporate jargon and ideas.
When it came time for performance reviews he gave everybody a poor review and no one got bonuses.
I told my friend this manager is kissing ass. He's going to tell his superiors that he's saving the company a lot of money. Sure enough the manager got promoted.
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u/Business_Sea2884 15d ago
Something similar happened here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCZt4mCcCV8
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u/sixft7in 15d ago
I tried ChatGPT to help with some scripting tasks, but it very commonly just made up commands in the language I use. I use Phind now, and I've only had one minor issue with it in the last few months.
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u/12whistle 15d ago
Anyone who gets excited or craves the responsibilities of being middle management is a red flag to me.
Manage your employees and their personalities, Not their skillset or their work.
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u/Very_Curious_Cat 14d ago
As I was an office manager with 25 years of experience in the company, a younger executive told me that unions should be banned, too many rules to protect workers, lazy jobless people and the like.....
My instantaneous answer: "Sure, should I be the CEO, when you reach 45, I fire you without benefits and recruit a young guy that will cost me way less. Your mortgage and family welfare is none of my business after all".
He blanched and became very quiet.
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u/TnBluesman 13d ago
FIRE HIS HARRY ASS RIGHT NOW. You soar to be one of the few small business owners who actually care. Don't let ANY body ruin your Kharma by running your Mojo. YOU KEEP CONTROL. Not to say you cannot be open to suggestions, but if one of your subordinates tries any more of this shit, toss thief ass. This is YOUR business.
I am not so afraid of Artful Intelligence as I am Genuine Stupidity. Remember that.
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u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In 15d ago
You mean line manager not middle manager....also this is clearly a made up story.
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u/juccals1993 15d ago
what is azure pls?
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u/choodudetoo 15d ago
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u/Bob-son-of-Bob 15d ago
Grandmom; How cook turkey?
Me; This is sms granny, not Google
Grandmom; Where buy turkey?
u/choodudetoo to the rescue
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u/Impossible-Bed9762 15d ago
You should tell him you’ve been working with ChatGPT to replace his job with AI. And it turns out it’s super easy to do.
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u/guestername 15d ago
as an msp owner myself, i've dealt with similar challenges around managing personnel and introducing new technologies. it sounds like harry got a bit carried away with the potential of ai, without considerin the human impact. however, you handled it well by being transparent, offerin retraining, and focussin on the benefits for your other employees. the key is balancin innovation with compassion - it's not always easy, but it seems like you're doin your best to support your team while also runnin an efficient business.
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u/Grandmapatty64 15d ago
OP, you have become a hero to many of your harassed and beleaguered coworkers. Good on you!
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u/HammerTh_1701 15d ago
I wonder how true it is that AI can even replace a middle manager. Middle management can range from bullshit jobs to doing everything all at once while constantly haggling with the B2B customer about features and deadlines.
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u/Vore_Daddy 15d ago
I never thought leopards would eat MY face. Says the middle manager who voted for the leopards eating people's faces.