Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:32:51 · Lenny Rachitsky, Molly Graham
[00:32:51] S0: That actually touches on one of the biggest findings in this survey, which is that first of all, half of people that filled it out are feeling the happiest they've ever felt. This is an important point we need to make is ... [00:32:51] S1: Yeah. Totally. [00:33:02] S0: Not everybody's feeling is fear and sense that it's all doomed, that actually half of people are feeling like they're having the best time of their life and their career and they're so excited about all the things going on. You may not feel that. If you're not that, you may not believe that. But from what I can see around me, many people are very excited. Even though they're working harder than they've ever worked, they're also the happiest they've ever been about their career. [00:33:28] S1: Yeah. Well, and I think the context, if I remember, was a lot of the happiness tended to be concentrated in people that were in smaller teams or had more authority. [00:33:40] S0: Absolutely. And even more interestingly, the strongest correlation is people who said that AI has amplified them. They feel like they figured out how to use AI to do more stuff that they're excited about. And interestingly, designers were the least happy from this work and that's actually what I hear from designers is everyone's moving faster. Design can't move that fast. You have to get feedback from people. You have to go through the alignment. You need to sit there and think. You can't just age and iterate [inaudible 00:34:12].
00:33:40 · Lenny Rachitsky, Molly Graham
[00:33:40] S0: Absolutely. And even more interestingly, the strongest correlation is people who said that AI has amplified them. They feel like they figured out how to use AI to do more stuff that they're excited about. And interestingly, designers were the least happy from this work and that's actually what I hear from designers is everyone's moving faster. Design can't move that fast. You have to get feedback from people. You have to go through the alignment. You need to sit there and think. You can't just age and iterate [inaudible 00:34:12]. [00:34:12] S1: Well, I don't know if you're hearing this from the designers, but there's also everyone's a designer now. [00:34:18] S0: Yeah. That's also part of it. [00:34:21] S1: When I worked in education, it's one of those industries that's really hard to work in because everyone was a student once so everyone thinks they know things. And I feel like now designers have that where it's like, "Oh, yeah. I just made this in Gemini," or, "I just made this in Claude. Here you go. Here's my design." And by the way, I think this is true of a lot of industries and whole products where it's like the gap between, "I made this," and what is actually great. The gap between, "I created this prototype," and a product that is exceptional is really big. The same is true obviously of design. Design just got way more accessible to the average person, at least okay design got really, really accessible, which can be exhausting when people are telling you how to do your job all the time.
00:34:21 · Molly Graham, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:34:21] S1: When I worked in education, it's one of those industries that's really hard to work in because everyone was a student once so everyone thinks they know things. And I feel like now designers have that where it's like, "Oh, yeah. I just made this in Gemini," or, "I just made this in Claude. Here you go. Here's my design." And by the way, I think this is true of a lot of industries and whole products where it's like the gap between, "I made this," and what is actually great. The gap between, "I created this prototype," and a product that is exceptional is really big. The same is true obviously of design. Design just got way more accessible to the average person, at least okay design got really, really accessible, which can be exhausting when people are telling you how to do your job all the time. [00:35:08] S0: Yeah. I had this tweet the other day that got a lot of traction along these lines. "A growing part of everyone's job is cleaning up the AI slop from other people trying to do your job."
00:35:18 · Molly Graham
[00:35:18] S1: Okay, so I have a lot of feelings about this and it goes to this super intelligence thing that we were talking about where it's like what we're saying. AI is the smartest employee you've ever hired in the entire world and it's better than you at everything. And I think it causes people to approach it that way when actually most of our experience with AI, I think a lot of people have had the experience with AI where it's like, "That's wrong. I just asked you to do that. This isn't good." I always think AI needs the same coaching and training that a human does, right? It needs context. It needs onboarding. It needs all of these things. And it's kind of much more like an intern, a bad intern often. I call it a lazy intern. And what happens, to your point about AI slop, is that folks are approaching it as if it's great, the best employee they've ever hired, so they just copy, paste, send. Right? And I'm like you would never do that if you though about it as an intern. You would never take the presentation that an intern handed you and just straight forward it to your boss. That is a little bit insane, right? You would iterate on it. You would edit it. You would ask, make sure that it had all the context from the 57 conversations that you've had with the summer intern before you ship that prezo to your boss. AI is the same. And I think part of what's going on with all the slop in the world is people have shipped accountability. It's like, "Oh. AI said this was good enough so I'm just going to copy, paste, send," and that is never been how good work happens. You know what I mean? So I feel like we need a change from this super intelligent being that's better than all of us at our jobs to, "No, it's just a fucking intern, man." And it needs the coaching and context and all of that and many iterations that most interns do. And I think the other thing, to your point, if you don't take accountability for the quality of your work, that shifts to someone else, right? The person that receives it has to deal with it and that is just a drain on organizations. And I literally see CEOs, we talk about this all the time in Glue Club, shipping a strategy memo that was clearly written by AI. That is you role-modeling for your organization that it's fine to outsource your thinking and it's fine to outsource your strategy.
00:37:47 · Molly Graham, Lenny Rachitsky
It's you role-modeling that you don't need accountability for the work that you send. And I feel like it goes down to this thing of this last six months, we've really been overvaluing productivity, which is just you hear all these stories about companies counting tokens and having token leaderboards. It brings me back to the days when people were counting cars in a parking lot and Slack bubbles and lines of code, which we all know is a really bad way to manage people. And we've been focused on, "How do you run as fast as you can on the treadmill?" but not, "Am I going anywhere?" which is to me the difference between productivity and efficiency. Productivity is can you generate more, which at this point I think we've proven we can all generate a bunch of shit that other people then have to wade through, to the point of your tweet. But is that efficient? Does that actually move the conversation forward? And the answer lately has been, "Why, no. It does not." [00:38:49] S0: Yeah. In that report, I have this iceberg image of just we're doing better on top of all the other stuff, but the output is worse, thinking judgment is coming down. So there's a lot of things we're watching. The good news is everyone's aware of this. They're like, "Yeah, maybe this isn't the way we should be working."
00:38:49 · Lenny Rachitsky, Molly Graham
[00:38:49] S0: Yeah. In that report, I have this iceberg image of just we're doing better on top of all the other stuff, but the output is worse, thinking judgment is coming down. So there's a lot of things we're watching. The good news is everyone's aware of this. They're like, "Yeah, maybe this isn't the way we should be working." [00:39:05] S1: No. I thought there was this really interesting engineering report that said for engineering, it has genuinely made people more productive, but the amount of lines of code that have had to be rewritten has gone up 8X. So it's like this very clear symbol of productivity. Obviously, also the security incidents have gone up, et cetera, et cetera. So it's like there's just this difference between productivity and efficiency and I think part of your burnout data is people are just getting swamped. And that's exhausting if what you're doing all day is wading through, "Did the person on the other side of this actually think about it? Did they actually care?" That's tiring. That doesn't feel like a good use of your time. It just feels a little bit infuriating. [00:39:54] S0: Yeah. It comes back to the grief of, "Oh, man. I missed what it used to be. Look at this weird new job I'm doing." [00:40:00] S1: Yeah, totally.