Role Averaging, Not Role Elimination

Sources#

• OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work

Summary#

Andrew Ambrosino's (OpenAI Codex) take on role collapse is the counter-caution to the wiki's mostly-optimistic Engineer PM Convergence cluster. He confirms the convergence — the Codex org has "seen a lot of role collapse," designers "speak engineer," PMs "write code," and "your role is the average of what you spend your time on" (mostly PM work this week ⇒ "you're a PM for now"). But he draws a hard line: eliminating the concept of roles dangerously eliminates the idea that disciplines are specialties with knowable best practices. "I've heard a lot of companies say we're getting rid of the product role — which is, by the way, a terrible idea… that whole discipline of product, with real best practices, real things that have been tried and failed, just gets abandoned because people are like 'oh, I wrote some code.'" The fluidity is real; the flattening-to-mush is a mistake.

Evidence note. practitioner-opinion — one leader's account of his org (OpenAI Codex), explicitly noting it may collapse roles more than other parts of the company/economy because it began as a technical product for engineers.

What erodes vs. what stays#

The distinction Ambrosino draws is between tool-gatekeeping (going away, good) and discipline judgment (staying, essential):

• Erodes — the "this isn't your lane" boundary and tool-mastery-as-identity. "I spent so long feeling like I shouldn't be a software engineer because I didn't care about assembly language or memorizing TypeScript syntax." Being good at a role got conflated with mastering its tool; that gate is falling. It's now "easier to switch roles, easier to learn the best practices, easier to not tie your effectiveness to the exact tool."
• Stays — every discipline's real skill component. "Engineering is a skill… other roles aren't just people vibing." His clincher: "You can use Excel, but you cannot work on the finance team." Product, design, and engineering each carry accumulated best practices that surviving-a-vibe-code doesn't confer.

The reconciliation: roles blur at the tool layer and average across a person's week, but the disciplines remain distinct bodies of expertise you can't skip. This is the returns-to-expertise finding restated as org design — expertise stays decisive even as execution cheapens.

Zone defense: coordinating the averaged org#

When "everybody's building everything" and 90 uncoordinated builds appear (Implementation Abundance Inverts Product Work), coordination can't be top-down. Ambrosino's product org runs "zone defense": product people spread out to cover gaps rather than clustering. "If two product people are working too closely, that's often not a good signal." You do a "force-directed activity" — figure out who's best at what, "create space between us so we've got full company coverage," then fill the gaps. The taste-makers "guide things from inception to what the product should be," because "the top-down, year-long planning thing is not going to work" amid the chaos of everyone throwing ideas everywhere.

IC and manager are both, now#

Role-averaging dissolves the IC/manager binary too: "It's not that management is going away or that everyone's an IC — everyone's kind of both." An IC "is not typing code out character by character — you're managing agents, managing work that comes together." A manager of teams "does the same thing at a different granularity." Both are steering; the difference is scope. This is why managers don't disappear: "not everyone can work on everything, in both breadth and depth." (The Anthropic-side Managers as ICs reaches the same both/and from the other direction — managers stay ICs; Ambrosino says ICs became managers-of-agents.)

The member-of-technical-staff thread#

The generic "member of technical staff" title (which Ambrosino traces back to Xerox and research-focused companies, now spreading) is the naming convention for role-averaging: your function isn't fixed by a bucket. But he resists reading it as "functions will disappear" — it's fluidity and easier role-switching, not the end of specialties.

Connections#

• Andrew Ambrosino — articulates the averaging thesis and the specialty-preservation caution
• Engineer PM Convergence — the Anthropic-side convergence account; this page is its OpenAI-side companion and explicit counter-caution ("don't eliminate the discipline")
• Managers as ICs — the mirror-image both/and: Anthropic keeps managers coding; Ambrosino turns ICs into managers-of-agents; managers persist in both
• Planning / Execution Division of Labor — the empirical division ("humans decide what, agents decide how") that role-averaging reorganizes teams around
• Implementation Abundance Inverts Product Work — the abundance ("everybody's building everything") that makes zone-defense coverage necessary
• Compute Allocator — the averaged IC as allocator/steerer of agent work rather than character-by-character author
• Parallel Agent Orchestration — "an IC manages agents" made literal: the fleet the averaged role now runs
• Returns to Expertise in Agentic Coding — the empirical backbone of "specialties don't disappear": domain expertise still decides success
• Research Taste as the Human Bottleneck — the rubber-stamping risk applies to zone-defense too: taste-makers "guiding from inception" only works if judgment is real, not approval-by-default

Open Questions#

• Where is the equilibrium between fluidity and specialty — how much role-averaging before a company loses the accumulated best practices Ambrosino warns about?
• Zone defense assumes enough high-taste people to cover the whole company; does it degrade in orgs without OpenAI's talent density, collapsing back to top-down planning?
• Does "your role is the average of what you spend time on" survive performance review and career ladders, or does it fragment them the way Cat Wu flags ("we're sacrificing product consistency")?

Sources#

• OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work — Ambrosino: "your role is the average of what you spend your time on"; "getting rid of the product role is a terrible idea"; the "zone defense" analogy