The 40% Tax: Why Your Engineering Managers Are Glorified Admins

The Expensive Assistant

Look at your engineering managers. They are likely some of your most expensive, experienced, and talented technical leaders.

Now, look at their calendars.

• Recruiting coordination
• Writing status updates
• Chasing down Jira tickets
• Manually compiling performance review data

We call this the 40% Tax. In most 50+ person organizations, engineering managers spend nearly half their week on administration rather than management.

Management vs. Administration

Management is coaching, architectural guidance, and unblocking complex problems. High value.

Administration is moving data from one tool to another. Zero value.

When EMs are stuck in admin mode, team morale drops, junior developers don’t get mentored, and code quality suffers.

Automating the “Chief of Staff” Layer

You don’t need to hire assistants for your engineering managers. You need an AI Chief of Staff.

Imagine an operational layer that:

• Auto-generates PDPs: Analyzes a developer’s code and suggests upskilling paths (Coursera, Udemy) instantly
• Pre-screens talent: Matches candidates to the team’s specific context before the EM ever reviews a résumé
• Summarizes context: Tells the EM, “Team Alpha is blocked on the Payment API,” without scrubbing Slack or Jira

Conclusion

Let your engineering managers be leaders again.
Offload the administration to AI.

Eliminate the admin tax. Deploy NotchUp as your AI Chief of Staff