Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:18:11 · Molly Graham, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:18:11] S1: The second one is basically don't worry, it's all going to be okay. [00:18:12] S0: Don't worry. Yeah. Okay. So, those don't feel necessarily correct anymore. So, we're going to get into that because I think that's, as you said, the core of people's concern. That was comforting, and now it's like, well, are you sure? This grief piece, just to spend a little more time here, I've been seeing this a lot in a lot of different professions, I've done these surveys that we might get into a little bit, but just engineering as a role has completely transformed in two years. It's been like the same job forever, writing code, sitting there writing code in various forms of IDEs, no longer part of the job. Now it's talking to your AI to write the code. Whether you're there or not, that's where it's all going. It's going to be 100% write this thing, build this thing. And I used to be an engineer, and I moved into product, and I was so missing that flow state of being an engineer, just sitting there coding, building, and now that's gone. You no longer sit there and just build a thing, you're just waiting for agents to run and then checking, you probably have 100 different agents, it's just a very strange new job. And I've heard from a lot of engineers just like, "I really miss what it used to be." Anything more there about just, I don't know, what you're hearing from folks about just like, man, this sucks?
00:19:27 · Molly Graham, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:19:27] S1: No, it's exactly... It's such a perfect example of the grief. I was giving a speech two weeks ago at a pretty fast-growing tech company, and this guy came up to me after and he'd been at the company for a couple of years, so it's gone through a huge amount of change. And he was talking to me about the fact that he just wasn't enjoying his role as much anymore. And my brain immediately went to, oh right, you enjoyed it when it was smaller, and there was more creativity, and now there's more structure. And so, I was talking to him about that. And it took a while, and to some extent, I want to go talk to him again because I feel like I missed it in the first conversation. Where actually, I think what he was talking about was the grief that is very present for him now in the fact that he's not sure what is his current job, what is this... The company has grown and so he's in a more structured environment and what is just the simple fact that engineering has totally changed? And a lot of what he was talking about was how much he missed being more hands-on, which is one way of saying it. But I think that that grief is happening for a lot of people, I think engineering is probably one of the most visceral areas where people's jobs have genuinely transformed. You had someone on last week who talked about the job used to be rowing and now it's- [00:20:55] S0: Oh, Tara, yeah, from OpenAI. [00:20:57] S1: Yeah. She said the job used to be rowing and now it's like- [00:21:00] S0: Steering.
00:21:00 · Lenny Rachitsky, Molly Graham
[00:21:00] S0: Steering. [00:21:00] S1: Steering. And I was like, I feel like there's a lot of people out in the world right now that are like, I don't want to fucking steer. Do you know what I mean? I want to row. I like rowing. And I think it can be hard to separate, I like rowing or I'm scared that rowing is the only thing I'm ever going to be good at, or it's what I know, and I don't know if I can be good at steering. And I think that's happening in a lot of disciplines. And so, that grief, first and foremost, that grief is really real. I was talking to a product leader just the other day who was like, "I don't know, man, we're all supposed to be these universal builders now," and she was like, "It's kind of lonely." She's like, "I miss these parts of the collaboration that have been a little bit stripped away because now I'm working with robots all the time." And I just said to her, "Yeah man, that sucks. Let's sit with it for a second. Change sucks." It also can be awesome, but we don't have to be fluffy bunnies about this, we can also just say this is hard. [00:22:10] S0: There's so much power in just saying the thing that you're feeling. [00:22:14] S1: I swear to God that that is a big chunk of what the Legos article did, was just like, this is hard and scary and it's going to be okay.
00:22:14 · Molly Graham, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:22:14] S1: I swear to God that that is a big chunk of what the Legos article did, was just like, this is hard and scary and it's going to be okay. [00:22:26] S0: This loneliness piece is such an important part to touch on. I had Fiona Fung on the podcast who leads Claude Code, the engineering team of Claude Code... She's Boris Cherny's boss, fun fact. And she said this exactly, that they're... I asked her just what's kind of the downside of this world? And it's engineers used to work with a bunch of engineers, teams used to be five engineers, 10 engineers, and now it's fewer teams, fewer engineers per team, and it's just like you're talking to agents all day. And so, it's another- [00:22:59] S1: It's not the same. [00:22:59] S0: It's not the same.
00:22:59 · Lenny Rachitsky, Molly Graham
[00:22:59] S0: It's not the same. [00:22:59] S1: No. It's not the same. And I think that's actually something that leaders of companies that are actually in charge of org structures and thinking about what the future of structure of teams needs to look like, you actually need to think about it. Because yeah, maybe you can strip out all the humans and you get all this productivity and maybe you get efficiency, but you also get sad humans. Do you know what I mean? And that doesn't lead to the best work for anyone. I thought your survey data around the fact that small teams and smaller companies are so much happier than people at the bigger companies was really interesting. Just because, A, that very much resonates with what I see in all my conversations with leaders, but it also to me is a reflection of I think we're seeing more at these bigger companies, where people are stripping out management layers, and there's a lot more pressure on productivity and things like that, and there's less room for the human. There's less room for the joy and the excitement when all you're doing is focusing on... For the joy and the excitement when all you're doing is focusing on optimizing cost and robot efficiency. [00:24:07] S0: Yeah. Man, there's so much to talk about here. There's this really cool framework on a mental model that Cory Doctorow wrote about a while ago where he talks about the centaur and the reverse centaur. You heard of this? [00:24:20] S1: No, but I love it already. [00:24:23] S0: Okay. I don't know if I know how to pronounce it. centaur? Does that sound right? Centaur?
00:24:23 · Lenny Rachitsky, Molly Graham
[00:24:23] S0: Okay. I don't know if I know how to pronounce it. centaur? Does that sound right? Centaur? [00:24:23] S1: Yeah, that's right. [00:24:26] S0: Okay. So centaur is a human body on top of an animal, like a horse. Sorry, a human head torso top of a human ... [00:24:32] S1: Clearly, you do not read enough Greek mythology. [00:24:35] S0: I just watched The Odyssey. I'm an expert in all things. [00:24:39] S1: Your kid is going to get older and you're going to read the Lightning Thief books and you'll get it. [00:24:42] S0: Lightning Thief. Okay. [00:24:43] S1: Yeah. [00:24:43] S0: I'll look forward to it. Okay. So the idea is a centaur is human head controlling an animal body. Reverse centaur is an animal head controlling a human body. His kind of insight here is what we want is AI that we control. We are in charge. It's doing our bidding. Awesome. Centaur, it's a cool way to live. What we need to avoid in fear is the reverse centaur where the AI is using us to do things. DoorDash people and Uber people are in that world already, not the funnest life. And it might expand to knowledge work. And I think that's a lot of people's fear is you're just this thing that's just controlling agents and just this closing gap of, "Here's where humans still are valuable," and then AI is telling you where to build and what to do and then it's doing the thing. So I've been thinking a lot about that.