Has HR Become Irrelevant?
Middle management is already, both metaphorically and often literally, redundant. Is HR next in the “AI” redundancy sweepstakes?
I wrote recently about how it’s far more likely that management themselves, rather than software engineers that are in danger of redundancy.
This is primarily due to their relatively low, or commonly non-existent to be perfectly honest, technical competence. Add to that he fact that the majority of their work — making PowerPoints¹, editing Jira tickets, and scheduling meetings can be easily automated with a bash script let alone an LLM, sorry, an “AI”.
Indeed, I believe that many of the recent layoff waves affecting software engineers at the larger tech companies are likely due to a kind of management protectionism — laying off some of the actual workers to save budget and keep themselves in the lifeboats whilst throwing everyone else they can overboard.
A course of action that is, of course, completely unsustainable.
Whilst every company and its kennels² is trying to squeeze “AI” into their products in everything from electric toothbrushes to breakfast cornflakes³ it seems as if, right now, it’s marketing that’s taken control of the company tiller rather than the usual ineptness of the “technical” management hierarchy.
