The engineering manager role is splitting in two

Stephane Moreau · article · 2026-06-09 source ↗ Reader 🖥️

AI Labor Disruption Career Development Coordination Cost Hands-On Leadership & the Pendulum Hierarchy & Org Charts Informal Leadership Organizational Legibility Small Teams & Compression Technical Leadership Track (IC / Staff-Plus Ladder)

The engineering-manager role is fracturing into two divergent futures — the code-adjacent tech lead manager and the non-technical multi-team EM — and because AI-shrunk teams are driving the split as an unplanned byproduct of flattening, engineers on the management path must diagnose which future their company is building and prepare accordingly rather than aiming at a single 'EM' destination.

practical · argumentative advice article (career strategy) — Descriptive in its trend analysis (why the EM role is fracturing) but its telos is action: the piece exists to tell engineers on the management path to diagnose which future their company is building and prepare accordingly. Prescriptive, not merely explanatory.

Structure

Part	Role
Opening / problem framing	Contrasts the team you joined five years ago (PM + EM + designer + 6-7 engineers) with 2026 team shapes, marshals the empirical flattening evidence (Meta 50:1, Amazon, Gartner, Gallup/Happily.ai span research, AI-empowered PMs), and poses the driving question: if teams shrink this far, what is the EM actually doing?
The first future: the tech lead manager comes back	Presents archetype 1 (TLM: senior engineer, still codes, light managerial load of a 3-4 person team), rebuts Larson's instability objection via shrinking load, then gives concrete preparation and names the TLM ceiling tradeoff.
The second future (the multi-team EM)	Presents archetype 2 (multi-team EM at ~50:1, near-entirely non-technical), asks how a technical engineer transitions to pure people-manager of five teams, offers three restructuring possibilities (professional managers, L&D programs, tiered AEM/EM/Senior EM levels), and gives the opposite preparation.
Which future is your company building?	Supplies a diagnostic: three questions (team-to-manager ratio trend, profile of the last person promoted to EM, whether leadership talks 'tech leads / player-coaches') to infer which trajectory a company is on, while conceding answers rarely point cleanly one way.
The engineering manager role of the future (conclusion)	Rejects thinking of 'becoming an EM' as a single destination; asserts both models are being tried right now and which replaces the traditional EM depends on whether companies conclude small AI-augmented teams need embedded technical leaders or interchangeable managers at scale.

Key terms

Tech lead manager (TLM)
The code-adjacent future of the EM role: a senior engineer who sets technical direction, still writes code every day, and carries only the lighter managerial load (1:1s, career conversations, project coordination) of a three-to-four-person team. Historically unstable per Larson, but rendered viable once shrinking teams shrink the managerial load.
Multi-team EM (the 'EM of 2030')
The other future: an EM who manages many small teams across multiple product areas at high ratios trending toward Meta's 50-to-1, doing almost entirely non-technical work (cross-domain 1:1s, performance management, coordination, upward reporting) with shallow depth on any one team.
The glue (of the traditional team)
The coordination, planning, and cohesion work a dedicated EM provided to a ~7-person team — the value that AI-empowered PMs (prototyping directly) plus one or two guardrail engineers dissolve, leaving 'what is the EM for?' as the open question.
Span of control / employee-to-manager ratio
The axis along which the EM role splits: the research-favored ~7-to-1 versus Meta's extreme 50-to-1; a rising ratio past 10-to-1 is read as a signal a company is heading toward the multi-team EM model.
Flattening Organizational Legibility
The reduction of management layers now underway — but happening as an unplanned byproduct of cost-driven layoffs and reorganizations rather than deliberate organizational design, which is why the future EM role is genuinely undecided.
EM level tiers (Associate EM / EM / Senior EM)
A proposed restructuring where EM levels are defined by how many teams they oversee (AEM: 1-2 teams; EM: 3-5; Senior EM: more, or manages AEMs/EMs) — one of three mechanisms companies use to grow engineers into multi-team managers.

Propositions

explicitThe engineering-manager role is bifurcating into two divergent futures — one that stays close to the code, one that widens across many teams — with contrasting implications for a career, so which one your company is building toward should determine what you develop now.conf: high
explicitcorroboratedAI is dissolving the 'glue' of the traditional ~7-person team: product managers now prototype working software directly (Claude Code, Lovable) and hand engineers a working reference instead of a Figma file, so a PM plus one or two guardrail engineers can cover what a full team used to — which raises the uncomfortable question of what a dedicated EM of a tiny team is even doing.conf: high
supportsThe founder of Postman says you have to kill your existing org chart · p7 — Both hold that AI removes the shipping bottleneck for non-coding roles — Moreau's PM who demos a clickable product on Monday is the same mechanism as kill-your-org-chart's claim that AI tools let PMs/designers ship production artifacts directly, dissolving the team's need for coordinating glue.
supports ←Adam Mosseri: AI is a tailwind for authenticity · p3 — Both describe AI dissolving the traditional ~7-13-person specialist team; Mosseri's 'product staff' pod is the same collapse of PM/design/data-science glue into a smaller generalist core.
explicitcorroboratedThe first future is the tech lead manager (TLM): a senior engineer who sets technical direction, still writes code every day, and carries the lighter managerial load of a three-to-four-person team; Larson's argument that TLMs are unstable assumed traditional team sizes where both jobs were full-time, and once the team shrinks the managerial load shrinks with it, making the split manageable.conf: high
supportsItchy Brain (Still Burning: Michael Grinich & Kent Beck on AI adoption, enterprise developer tools) · p9 — still-burning claims the pure people-manager is evaporating in favor of hands-on leaders who drive delivery; Moreau's TLM (senior engineer still writing code, setting technical direction) is exactly that hands-on future.
supports ←We don't write code anymore · p7 — Quigley's EM-who-still-codes-via-agents is a concrete, lived instance of the 'tech lead manager' path that piece describes abstractly.
explicitcontestedThe second future is the multi-team EM: instead of managing one team of seven, managing many smaller teams across multiple product areas at ratios trending toward Meta's 50-to-1, where the work becomes almost entirely non-technical (1:1s across unfamiliar problems, performance management, cross-team coordination, upward reporting) and technical depth on any single team stays shallow.conf: high
refinesThe founder of Postman says you have to kill your existing org chart · p6 — kill-your-org-chart argues middle-management layers are coordination overhead AI makes unnecessary; Moreau refines this by showing one live future is middle management not vanishing but widening — the multi-team EM at 50:1 — so 'unnecessary' overstates a genuinely contested outcome.
contradictsItchy Brain (Still Burning: Michael Grinich & Kent Beck on AI adoption, enterprise developer tools) · p9 — The same still-burning claim (pure people-manager evaporating) is contradicted by Moreau's second future, where the pure, non-technical people-manager does not evaporate but scales up to many teams — the article deliberately keeps both outcomes live.
supportsItchy Brain (Still Burning: Michael Grinich & Kent Beck on AI adoption, enterprise developer tools) · p10 — still-burning's conditional (if EMs have 50 direct reports, the 1:1 apprenticeship channel breaks) has its antecedent affirmed by Moreau, who presents the ~50:1 multi-team EM as a real emerging trajectory, not a hypothetical.
explicitBecause the two paths demand opposite preparation — deepen technical judgment and AI-code-review skill for the TLM path, versus practice domain-transferable people skills (running 1:1s with someone whose work you don't understand, getting visible to skip-levels) for the multi-team path — engineers should stop treating 'becoming an EM' as a single career destination and instead diagnose which future their company is building and develop accordingly.conf: high
supportsSupporting Your Employees' Career Growth When Everyone Is Overwhelmed · p2 — HBR's 'the career ladder model is obsolete; careers move sideways' is instantiated by Moreau's prescription to stop treating 'becoming an EM' as a single destination and instead diagnose which of several divergent paths applies.
explicitcontestedMost companies have not deliberately chosen a model; the flattening is happening as an unplanned byproduct of cost-driven layoffs and reorganizations, which leaves engineers navigating a career path that may not exist by the time they reach it.conf: high
supportsAI Won't Save the Kingdoms We Built · p1 — Narrow overlap: both frame the current wave of AI-enabled flattening as cost-/politics-driven rather than a deliberate, principled organizational design — Moreau's 'happening through cost-driven layoffs, not deliberate design' aligns with Cutler's account of flattening pushed by self-interested advocates.
contradicts ←Software Engineering at Google · p16 — Henderson describes Google's engineer/manager split as a deliberate, stable, working policy; the later document describes the same kind of split elsewhere happening as an unplanned, cost-driven byproduct of layoffs rather than deliberate design — same structural feature, opposite account of why it exists and how durable it is.
refines ←Pim de Morree's Post · p2 — That article claims most companies have not deliberately chosen a flattening model and are flattening as an unplanned byproduct of layoffs; Bayer is a counter-instance of an organization that deliberately designed de-layering and outcome ownership as a structural program, ahead of and independent of its AI rollout.
explicitThe multi-team EM role may increasingly be filled by professional managers with adjacent backgrounds (product, program, or operations) rather than by engineers, because the traditional engineer-to-EM route — first running one team — does not obviously scale to running five.conf: medium
explicitdevelopedEmpirical signals of the flattening are already visible: Meta's 50-to-1 AI-team ratio, Amazon's mandated 15% increase in the IC-to-manager ratio, Gartner's prediction that 20% of organizations will use AI to eliminate more than half of current middle-management positions through 2026, and a 91% rise in PR-review time on high-AI-adoption teams (Faros) that makes review skill the scarce resource — all against research (Gallup, Happily.ai) placing the optimal span near seven-to-one.conf: high
refines ←Managers Are Not Overhead: They Are Infrastructure · p8 — Both cite the same empirical flattening signals (Meta, Amazon, Gartner data); this essay refines the interpretation by arguing the signals indicate flattening rather than contraction of the underlying role.
implicitThe coordination and 'glue' work that historically justified a dedicated people-manager is being automated or devalued — not merely redistributed — otherwise the role would not need to split at all.conf: medium
implicitAn organization (and therefore an engineer's local reality) will trend toward one pole or the other; the piece presumes a clean two-way fork with no stable third model, which is why the reader is told to pick a side to prepare for.conf: medium

Arguments

Engineers on the management path should stop treating 'becoming an EM' as one destination and instead prepare for whichever of the two divergent EM futures their company is actually building. strength: medium

Explicit premises:

AI-augmented small teams and PM-driven prototyping dissolve the traditional team's glue, so the ~7-person-team EM role is being questioned.
Two divergent answers are emerging: the code-adjacent TLM and the widened, non-technical multi-team EM.
The two paths require opposite preparation (deepen technical judgment vs. practice domain-transferable people skills).
Most companies have not deliberately chosen, so the destination is genuinely uncertain.

Implicit premises:

The coordination/glue work that justified the traditional EM is being automated or devalued, not merely redistributed (load-bearing).
An org will settle toward one pole or the other; there is no stable third role to prepare for.
The reader's future belongs to the 'management path' — the pure technical-track / IC-leadership ladder is not treated as an option.

Inferences:

If preparation diverges and the outcome is company-dependent, a single generic 'become an EM' plan is dominated by a diagnose-then-prepare strategy under uncertainty.

The tech lead manager, historically judged unstable, becomes a viable model once AI shrinks teams. strength: medium