Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:25:36 · Molly Graham
[00:25:36] S1: Yeah. I mean, I want to get to the fear side of this and the fear narrative as well because I think that's one of the things that is really different in this stage and this sort of phase because it's really hard to tell people lean into change when they're like, "But wait, what's on the other side? You're telling me to let go of my Legos. You're telling me to make myself irrelevant. Fuck you." You know what I mean? I don't believe there's a job on the other side. And I think that fear narrative, I am sure some of it is real, but some of it is really overblown and it's creating a pretty toxic environment for people where it's so hard to lean into this change with joy or excitement or any sense of opportunity. I would say the narrative right now is literally like, "Okay, we hired this new employee. This new employee is the smartest employee that you have ever met. This employee is 10 times smarter than you. And I want you to pour every single thing that you know into this employee and then they're going to take your job in six months." Who the fuck wants to do that? Do you know what I mean? No one wants to do that. That is not a good narrative for anyone. By the way, it's also not reality. As of right now, there is not a lot of data, although you may have more than I do, that says that AI is genuinely taking jobs away. And I have a lot of beef to pick with all the AI-branded layoffs out there because they're bullshit. They're not about AI. They are about badly run companies slapping an AI label and getting some share points from that versus saying, "Whoops, we hired too many people." And they're propagating this fear narrative that is like, " Your job is going away. There is no job on the other side." So I took over this podcast, which you know, called WorkLife and it's let me have all these really fun conversations with people. And one of the best conversations I had was with this journalist named Manoush Zomorodi and she has been a journalist for 30 years. You want to talk about an industry that people have been predicting the death of for 30 years, right? Journalism. And Manoush has done everything. She started the BBC and she was super early in audio and she did this crazy crypto audio podcast and she's the host of TED Radio Hour. So Manoush over 30 years has built a very successful career in an industry that is being constantly disrupted.
00:28:15 · Molly Graham, Lenny Rachitsky
And from talking to her, I basically walked away with this really interesting question that is totally different than, "What would you do if you believed your job was going to disappear?" It was, "What would you do if you believed your job was always going to exist? It was just going to look completely different every six years." And I just kind of wish that was the conversation we were having about all the jobs in tech and honestly all the jobs that are theoretically going to get taken by AI, which is the form is definitely going to change. But until we have real evidence, what if we believe that they're not going away, they're just going to reinvent themselves? [00:29:01] S0: That is awesome advice. And that's exactly what's been happening so far. [00:29:05] S1: Yeah. [00:29:06] S0: There's always this fear that, "Okay, but now it'll be different in X years," but that is actually exactly what's been happening. Engineering exists, different job. There's actually more demand than ever for engineers. [00:29:16] S1: Exactly. Your data said that and I was like, "Thank you for publishing this data, Lenny."
00:29:16 · Molly Graham, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:29:16] S1: Exactly. Your data said that and I was like, "Thank you for publishing this data, Lenny." [00:29:21] S0: Before we get into the advice, kind of how it's evolved, there's a couple things I want to share which touch on things you mentioned about how people are feeling. So I'll share these images on the screen as we talk about this of just people's feelings right now, just to come back to that point. So we did the survey for two years now in a row of how tech people are feeling and how they're feeling about AI and all these things. And so we have a trend now of over time how things are changing and we look at burnout and optimism. And in 2025, 44% of people said they feel burned out. This year, 55% of people said they are burned out. That's a huge jump. That's a 10% increase in a year of people feeling burnt out. And it makes sense. As you said, you're basically now expected to do more work with not probably more money. And now it's just like, "Okay. Well, you got all these AI. Why aren't you getting more done? Look at all these other teams moving so much faster. We're screwed. We're going to go out of business. We got to move fast." So it makes sense.
00:30:27 · Molly Graham
[00:30:27] S1: I mean, I love that you do that survey because I also think I learn a ton from it every time you've published it. And it's also just a great reality check about how people are feeling because literally what your survey says is more than half the people are feeling burnt out which is nuts. And also, yeah. I believe it. And I think burnout comes from a lot of different places and can mean a lot of different things to people, but to me, what I read inside that data was number one, emotions are tiring and there is a lot of exhaustion trying to understand what's going on in a ... I mean, the rate of change right now is nuts, both in terms of obviously the technological change, but I actually think the narrative change is also pretty exhausting for people. "Oh, this month, this is important. Oh, next month, this." There's a thrash inside of that that's pretty tiring. I was emailing with a friend at OpenAI and she was like, "It's taken us literally six months to go from this token- maxing, everybody aggressive productivity, use AI everywhere," to a conversation that's like, "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Is this actually making a difference? Because it's very expensive." And she's like, "Six months. That's all it took." And so if you are sitting inside that, it means six months ago they were like, "Use AI all the time, every day, everywhere," and now they're like, "Are you doing it well enough?" And Hilary Gridley said the same thing where she was like six months ago everyone was like, "How do I get people to use AI?" And now they're like, "How do I get people to stop using AI so badly." And it's like that six month thrash, often much faster than that, is tiring for people. The grief is tiring, let alone I think that feeling which you mentioned in your survey of, "I'm going to be expected to do more for the same amount of pay." That's exhausting. I think people feel taken advantage of and, "What is in this for me? Why is it fun for me? What's the opportunity for me?" And I think particularly at bigger companies, it feels almost adversarial sometimes where, "I get why it's good for our bottom line, but remind me why that's good for me."