How is SWE & EM roles are changing in the age of AI

In 2023, proposal reviews and cross-team alignment took about 40% of my week as an engineering manager. Today it’s 70–80%. This talk is the story of what happened in between — not from headlines, but from inside a team at a major fintech — and what it means for how engineers and managers should grow from here.

What I’ll cover: - What actually changed in our development cycle between 2023 and 2026 — a real before/after of one team, including where the time went and which parts of the manager’s job quietly automated themselves

• The initiative explosion: why engineers now surface proposals that would never have existed before (an incident fix that turned into major recurring infra savings), and what that means for how ICs build careers when ideas are no longer scarce

• The AI slop problem nobody budgets for: how twenty-page generated documents and AI-assisted code shift the review burden onto leads and managers — and the simple norms that fixed it for us, including “the author owns the compression, not the reviewer”

• Confession of a bottleneck: how I ended up as the slowest part of my own accelerated team, and the operating-model change that followed — which decisions moved to tech leads, and which stayed with me

• Tech leads as amplifiers of judgment, not just execution: what I now look for when identifying and growing leads, and why they’re the real unlock behind “one manager, wider charter”

• What the flattening headlines (50 engineers per manager, managers back to code) get right and wrong — grounded guidance for engineers deciding between IC and management tracks in this era or excelling in each.