Your Team Got Copilot. Now Leadership Thinks They Have Infinite Capacity.

Your Team Got Copilot. Now Leadership Thinks They Have Infinite Capacity. There's a post going around r/ExperiencedDevs that engineering managers are quietly sharing in DMs. A middle manager writes: "When AI adoption was being encouraged, we were told to use it to improve productivity. Today I'm completely burned out because I'm working 12-15 hours every day. My work has increased by at least 5x. Whenever I push back citing lack of bandwidth, I am told how it should be manageable since we have AI." Sound familiar? This is the hidden cost nobody talks about when they analyze Copilot ROI. It's not just that 60% of seats go unused. It's that when AI tools are adopted — but without a framework — the productivity gains get absorbed by increased demands, not by the team. The Math That Breaks Everything Here's how the logic plays out in most orgs: Company buys Copilot/Claude Code licenses Leadership sees articles claiming "AI makes devs 30-40% faster" Leadership adjusts sprint expectations up