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Managing UpAuthor: Travis Swicegood, Brandon Hays, Nickolas Means
Management tips, stories, and interviews to help navigate the challenges of managing creative and technical teams. Language: en-us Genres: Business, Technology Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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"What Am I Even Paid To Do?" — Ego, Identity, and the AI Reckoning
Episode 45
Thursday, 7 May, 2026
Travis, Brandon, and Nick come back from a two-year absence to interrogate the question one of Travis's engineers asked him about using AI: this feels like cheating — what am I actually paid to do? What happens to an engineer's sense of value when the syntax they spent fifteen years getting good at is suddenly the cheap part? Why have managers, of all people, adapted to AI faster than the senior staff engineers they came from? What does "ego" really mean here — superiority, or just the load-bearing identity that gets shaken when the work changes underneath you? And when we say "fail fast," do we mean it, or do we just mean it on the recruiting page? They get into the identity crisis baked into the manager-IC transition, why the same cognitive move makes you good at both, and the version of "ego" and "failure" worth keeping. Also: Brandon's existential crisis is "permanent and ongoing," thank you for asking. Blood in the Machine – https://brianmerchant.org/ Co-Intelligence – https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/741805/co-intelligence-by-ethan-mollick/ Thinking, Fast and Slow – https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374533557/thinkingfastandslow/ The end of 0% interest rates: what the new normal means for engineering managers and tech leads – https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/zirp-engineering-managers
