1:1s with Your Manager (who's AI)

I've been working at a new job as an engineer for 3 weeks. It's been very interesting going back to being an engineer, especially at a company that's so small. One of the things I provided to my engineers as a manager in my previous role was deep understanding of the work that they had done, the interests that they have, the goals that they would like to achieve, and the place in their career and how to get to the next level. Understanding all of these things helped to build motivation, and that motivation led to better work, happier engineers, and happier teams.

Shout out to Ernie and his goals exploration framework.

The team that I work with is great, but the startup is so small that I don't have a manager in a traditional role nor access to one. I can talk to our CEO about product-related problems. I can talk to the CTO about engineering decisions, I can talk to the designers about design things. I can talk to the other engineers about what we're building. But, in terms of career progression and satisfaction in my job, I no longer have a person at the company who fits the role.

Obviously, AI has been on my mind, considering that we are building an AI therapist system. I immediately started thinking about whether or not it would be valuable to talk about my career with Claude in order to understand what the recommendations of the industry and best practices are. Claude and other LLMs have stolen the minds of industry experts when it comes to how to progress in your career, how to find satisfaction in your career, how to find motivation at work. All of those things and being able to query all of their ghosts in aggregate is a really interesting feature.

The thing that I was missing is the time.

The way that I solved this problem when I was a manager was to schedule one-on-ones with my engineers, and I am now going to start scheduling one-on-ones with an AI to specifically focus on this. It is likely going to be weird sitting in a room, talking to an AI back and forth, but with the voice modes that AIs have these days, it's very interesting to imagine that this may actually feel like a conversation. With enough prompting and enough rule following, I may actually even be able to get the agent to feel less like an LLM and more like a partner.

This is similar to the product we're building at work that helps with coaching. Life coaching,career coaching, etc. make a difference over time.