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Business Insider
12-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
The age of incredibly powerful 'manager nerds' is upon us, Anthropic cofounder says
Managers need to have "soft skills" like communication alongside harder technical skills. But what if the job becomes more about managing AI agents than people? Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark says AI agents are ushering in an era of the "nerd-turned-manager." "I think it's actually going to be the era of the manager nerds now, where I think being able to manage fleets of AI agents and orchestrate them is going to make people incredibly powerful," he said on an episode of the "Conversations with Tyler" podcast last week. "We're going to see this rise of the nerd-turned-manager who has their people, but their people are actually instances of AI agents doing large amounts of work for them," he added. Clark said he's already seeing this play out with some startups that have "very small numbers of employees relative to what they used to have because they have lots of coding agents working for them." He's not the only tech exec to predict AI agents will let teams do more with fewer people. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the Stripe Sessions conference last week that tapping into AI can help entrepreneurs "focus on the core idea" of their business and operate with "very small, talent-dense teams." "If you were starting whatever you're starting 20 years ago, you would have had to have built up all these different competencies inside your company, and now there are just great platforms to do it," Zuckerberg said. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan said in March that he thinks "vibe coding" — or using generative AI tools to quickly develop and experiment in software development — will help smaller startup teams do the work of 50 to 100 engineers. "People are getting to a million dollars to 10 million dollars a year revenue with under 10 people, and that's really never happened before in early stage venture," Tan said. "You can just talk to the large language models and they will code entire apps." AI researchers and other experts have warned there are risks to over-reliance on the technology, especially as a replacement to human manpower, including LLMs having hallucinations and concerns that vibe coding can make it harder in some instances to scale and debug code. Mike Krieger, the cofounder of Instagram and chief people officer at Anthropic, said on a podcast earlier this year that he predicts a software developer's job will change in the next three years to focus more on double-checking code generated by AI rather than writing it themselves. "How do we evolve from being mostly code writers to mostly delegators to the models and code reviewers?" he said on the " 20VC" podcast. The job will be about "coming up with the right ideas, doing the right user interaction design, figuring out how to delegate work correctly, and then figuring out how to review things at scale," he added. A spokesperson for Anthropic previously told BI the company sees itself as a "testbed" for workplaces navigating AI-driven changes to critical roles. "At Anthropic, we're focused on developing powerful and responsible AI that works with people, not in place of them," the spokesperson said. "As Claude rapidly advances in its coding capabilities for real-world tasks, we're observing developers gradually shifting toward higher-level responsibilities."
Business Insider
10-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of some engineers at Meta. Here's how AI is shaking up other Big Tech firms.
Mark Zuckerberg said today's founders and entrepreneurs should take advantage of the technology he couldn't when he was building Facebook two decades ago. "If you were starting whatever you're starting 20 years ago, you would have had to have built up all these different competencies inside your company, and now there are just great platforms to do it," the Meta CEO said said at the Stripe Sessions conference this week. Zuckerberg says using technologies like AI can help today's founders "focus on the core idea" of a company. "I think that this is just going to lead to much better quality stuff that gets created around the world because now you're just being able to have these, like, very small talent-dense teams that are, like, passionate about an idea," Zuckerberg said. Replacing the 'midlevel engineer' Zuckerberg has talked about the effect of AI on much larger companies, including Meta, on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast in January. "Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of midlevel engineer that you have at your company that can write code," he said. Of course, LLMs have been known to have troubling hallucinations at times, and companies could see negative repercussions from hollowing out their mid-level engineer ranks. "Ease of use is a double-edged sword," Harry Law, an AI researcher at the University of Cambridge, previously told BI. "Beginners can make fast progress, but it might prevent them from learning about system architecture or performance." Using AI too extensively in coding could also make scaling or debugging difficult, he warned. "Security vulnerabilities may also slip through without proper code review," he said. Still, companies are finding ways to charge ahead with AI Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan said in a CNBC interview in March that "vibe coding" will help startups stay leaner by allowing smaller teams of engineers to produce work that would otherwise take a team of 50 to 100 developers. "I mean, the wild thing is people are getting to a million dollars to 10 million dollars a year revenue with under 10 people, and that's really never happened before in early stage venture," he said. "You can just talk to the large language models and they will code entire apps," Tan continued. "You don't have to hire someone to do it." Vibe coding, the hot new buzzword in the valley, was coined by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy in a post on X in February. "There's a new kind of coding I call 'vibe coding,' where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists," Karpathy wrote in his post. "I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding — I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works." Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke recently told managers that before asking to hire someone new, they must prove AI couldn't do the job better alone. In March, Anthropic cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei said AI could be "writing essentially all of the code" in 12 months' time. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in the company's third-quarter earnings call in October that more than 25% of the new code created at the company is generated by AI and then checked by employees. Pichai said using AI to code boosted the company's "productivity and efficiency." "This helps our engineers do more and move faster," Pichai said. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in early February that he expected software engineering would look "very different" at the end of 2025. The use of AI at large tech companies to aid, expedite, or outright do their employees' work dovetails with the industry's growing focus on efficiency in recent years. Zuckerberg proclaimed 2023 a "year of efficiency" for the company, which has seen several rounds of mass layoffs in recent years. Several of its peers have also slashed thousands of jobs as they focus on flattening their organizational structures and pushing out their "lowest performers."
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Mark Zuckerberg says his management style involves no 1-on-1s, few direct reports, and a 'core army' of 30 running Meta
Mark Zuckerberg lifted the lid on his management style at Stripe's Sessions conference. Zuckerberg said a "core army" of up to 30 people is tasked with running about 15 product groups. He doesn't like delegating or managing people and doesn't have regular one-on-ones with his direct reports. Forget the typical CEO playbook — Mark Zuckerberg runs Meta on his own terms. The Meta chief, speaking during a Tuesday fireside chat with Stripe cofounder John Collison, said he doesn't enjoy managing people or delegating. While he doesn't have 60 direct reports like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, the two tech titans do have one thing in common: they don't have recurring one-on-one meetings with their top the Stripe Sessions fireside chat, Zuckerberg opened up about his hands-on, no-frills approach, a key part of which is having a "core army" of handpicked lieutenants and just a few direct reports. Zuckerberg favors a non-hierarchical structure at Meta, which he organizes thematically. "Our management team is not really just my direct reports, it's sort of this broader group of like 25 to 30 people who I try to include in everything," Zuckerberg said. He added that this "core army" is empowered to get anything done across the company, and that he makes sure this inner circle is up to speed on what's going on inside Meta. "Those people are all brilliant and I work with them super closely, but I also go directly to the people who are running whatever the thing is that I care about, so we're very non-hierarchical in that way," he explained. Zuckerberg said Meta is divided into around 15 product groups, covering everything from Facebook and Instagram to its ad system and virtual reality. He outlined how each group is led by its own executive. The leaders of Meta's app-based products report to Chris Cox, the chief product officer. Heads of cross-functional services, such as ads, infrastructure, and integrity systems, report to Meta's chief operating officer, Javier Olivan. And leaders working on future technology platforms report to Andrew Bosworth, the company's chief technology officer. Zuckerberg views the people in charge of the 15 product groups as "the people who are running the real things" and shared that he doesn't want to have 15 direct reports, which is why they report to other members of the management team. "I don't have 60 direct reports, I don't even like managing people," Zuckerberg told Collison. Zuckerberg also isn't interested in micromanaging. He said, "I think if you're going to report to me, you need to be able to manage yourself." The Meta CEO rejects the idea that leadership is about hiring people and delegating tasks to them. Instead, he prefers to stay closely involved in critical decisions. "I just don't believe in delegating," he said. "I think that that's generally a good way for founders to operate. If you're running the company and you're on the hook for everything and there's something that's important at whatever level of detail in the organization, I don't get the logic of saying 'I'm not going to be involved in that.'" He added, "You want to have humility and know that if you're diving into some decision, you may not have the most context immediately, but I generally think that you want to be able to just have the cultural expectation that things are not going to be so hierarchical and you're just going to dive into whatever you want." Zuckerberg said he tries to minimize standing meetings and has just two weekly recurring meetings with a small group. One is an open-ended strategy discussion, and the other focuses on company priorities. He said, "When I say I don't have one-on-ones, I don't have recurring scheduled one-on-ones, I talk to all these people constantly, more than they want to talk to me I'm sure, but I do it when I have something that I want to talk to them about, or if they want to talk to me I try to generally keep a bunch of time open." He also tries to ensure that he has a block of time each day to focus on key tasks, or he will "get really frustrated" and be in a "bad mood."He said, "It's like, you have too many days like that in a row and I just like explode, so I think you want to make sure that you keep a meaningful amount of your time open so that way you can just go talk to the people that you want to either about whatever you want to get done or whatever you want to learn about about what's going on in the organization," he didn't immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment. Read the original article on Business Insider Sign in to access your portfolio
Business Insider
08-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Mark Zuckerberg says his management style involves no 1-on-1s, few direct reports, and a 'core army' of 30 running Meta
Forget the typical CEO playbook — Mark Zuckerberg runs Meta on his own terms. The Meta chief, speaking during a Tuesday fireside chat with Stripe cofounder John Collison, said he doesn't enjoy managing people or delegating. While he doesn't have 60 direct reports like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, the two tech titans do have one thing in common: they don't have recurring one-on-one meetings with their top leaders. During the Stripe Sessions fireside chat, Zuckerberg opened up about his hands-on, no-frills approach, a key part of which is having a "core army" of handpicked lieutenants and just a few direct reports. A 'core army' of 25 to 30 people runs Meta Zuckerberg favors a non-hierarchical structure at Meta, which he organizes thematically. "Our management team is not really just my direct reports, it's sort of this broader group of like 25 to 30 people who I try to include in everything," Zuckerberg said. He added that this "core army" is empowered to get anything done across the company, and that he makes sure this inner circle is up to speed on what's going on inside Meta. "Those people are all brilliant and I work with them super closely, but I also go directly to the people who are running whatever the thing is that I care about, so we're very non-hierarchical in that way," he explained. Zuckerberg said Meta is divided into around 15 product groups, covering everything from Facebook and Instagram to its ad system and virtual reality. He outlined how each group is led by its own executive. The leaders of Meta's app-based products report to Chris Cox, the chief product officer. Heads of cross-functional services, such as ads, infrastructure, and integrity systems, report to Meta's chief operating officer, Javier Olivan. And leaders working on future technology platforms report to Andrew Bosworth, the company's chief technology officer. Zuck doesn't have many direct reports Zuckerberg views the people in charge of the 15 product groups as "the people who are running the real things" and shared that he doesn't want to have 15 direct reports, which is why they report to other members of the management team. "I don't have 60 direct reports, I don't even like managing people," Zuckerberg told Collison. Zuckerberg also isn't interested in micromanaging. He said, "I think if you're going to report to me, you need to be able to manage yourself." He doesn't believe in delegation The Meta CEO rejects the idea that leadership is about hiring people and delegating tasks to them. Instead, he prefers to stay closely involved in critical decisions. "I just don't believe in delegating," he said. "I think that that's generally a good way for founders to operate. If you're running the company and you're on the hook for everything and there's something that's important at whatever level of detail in the organization, I don't get the logic of saying 'I'm not going to be involved in that.'" He added, "You want to have humility and know that if you're diving into some decision, you may not have the most context immediately, but I generally think that you want to be able to just have the cultural expectation that things are not going to be so hierarchical and you're just going to dive into whatever you want." No recurring one-on-one meetings Zuckerberg said he tries to minimize standing meetings and has just two weekly recurring meetings with a small group. One is an open-ended strategy discussion, and the other focuses on company priorities. He said, "When I say I don't have one-on-ones, I don't have recurring scheduled one-on-ones, I talk to all these people constantly, more than they want to talk to me I'm sure, but I do it when I have something that I want to talk to them about, or if they want to talk to me I try to generally keep a bunch of time open." He also tries to ensure that he has a block of time each day to focus on key tasks, or he will "get really frustrated" and be in a "bad mood." He said, "It's like, you have too many days like that in a row and I just like explode, so I think you want to make sure that you keep a meaningful amount of your time open so that way you can just go talk to the people that you want to either about whatever you want to get done or whatever you want to learn about about what's going on in the organization," he said.
