Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:53:02 · Fiona Fung
[00:53:02] S1: I started out, it was for a very short amount of time, but actually this was my journey between Microsoft and Meta. So at Meta, I interviewed as a manager, but I think at least for the first quarter, I was also an IC because I really wanted to learn what it's like to be a Meta engineer, because before then I was at Microsoft, cut my teeth on engineering at Microsoft. So I knew all the code bases, the tools, the languages, but it was so valuable to have those first months actually learn what it's like to ship as a Meta engineer. Plus it was also fun. I think sometimes we forget, but that's by the way, what I love about Claude Code because the last time I shipped production software at Meta was probably 2017, and every year, I do a lot of dogfooding and I also use dogfooding to help me vet the quality of product as well. But it's been a very long time since I shipped production software, it's because part of it is I don't want to screw something up. I'm always so scared of what if I do something and then I cause a bug and then am I verifying everything properly, or am I wasting someone's time? Because also the tool flows would change, but I remember that first week on Claude, at first I almost again did my usual, let me go meet all the engineers and treat them to coffee, and then I'm like, "Oh wait, let me ask Claude." And so Claude was this really good onboarding buddy of mine because I was curious about the copays asking questions, and then it also really helped me do the automated test, but I also want to still do some manual testing, and I asked Claude, "Hey, help me come up with what's the way for me to manually test this to make sure I cover all the case." But all that then gives me confidence that okay, I can ship here again. And then I got kind of more comfortable with it again, and so I've actually had a lot of friends reach out to me that have been managed for a while that's like, "Hey, I'm shipping code again, thanks to Claude." But in general, it's just important to me as leaders to make sure you're using the product that your team builds.
00:55:09 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:55:09] S0: It's so interesting that you are overseeing the team as an engine leader that is most changing the role of an engineer. It's such a meta role. The work of an engineer is transforming because of the software that you're building. One question along these lines is just do you worry about engineers' skills to code atrophying from not actually writing code anymore and does it even matter? Is this something you think about? Is it a big deal?
00:55:39 · Fiona Fung
[00:55:39] S1: It's interesting because we actually have this discussion on the team a bit. Are there things that we miss? Or actually to your point, I'm always thinking about when someone's onboarding and ramping, you have Boris who handrolled the code in the early days and of course now doesn't anymore, but he gained that knowledge from before because he was in the code base. So for especially all the engineers that join, I'm also like, make sure you're taking the time too to all the work that you do, still get the understanding of the architecture or the change because it goes back to that trust but verify. Maybe one day it won't matter anymore, but at the pace that we're going, I actually still think, it's always double clicking on that layer that you depend on. Maybe that to me is a meta. It's always take that time to learn about your dependencies because this way when your dependencies change, you're kind of more aware, or you might not be taking advantage of changes to dependencies. So I think it's always about doing that double click, but the other thing that we found interesting on the Claude Code team is after a while we felt it could start being a lonely experience because we all started just working with our agents so much. So recently we started maybe a pairwise programming lunch because what we also learned was on Claude Code, everybody uses Claude Code Cowork. Everybody uses a flow so differently, and so we found that wow, when we do pairwise programming, we actually learn so much from each other, and then the other thing too is we make sure that we also have the maker time together too. So for example, hackathons is another thing we really like to do just to make sure we're kind of interacting together as a team.
00:57:16 · Lenny Rachitsky, Fiona Fung
[00:57:16] S0: That is such a good point, just like the loneliness that emerges because used to be engineer teams building code together. Someone's doing backend, someone's doing front end, someone's doing iOS app, probably a bunch of people on the backend and it's like, " Well, if 10 Claudes running in parallel doing all these things," that is such a good idea of just finding ways to connect engineers. So the idea here is almost parallel programming but not. It's like parallel play when kids are grown up. You're kind of working next to each other but building your own things, but even just watching how other people build, your finding is really valuable. [00:57:51] S1: Yeah, and it's because our own tool chain is changing so fast as well, but yeah, it's very interesting to me. Everybody on our team just uses Claude Code and Cowork in different ways, and so every time I watch someone work, then I learn something myself as well. [00:58:06] S0: How do you manage people getting over obsessed with their optimizing their workflows? Is there anything you're just like, "Okay, it's fine, just keep going." [00:58:15] S1: I haven't seen too many folks on our team. I think as everybody is just really excited about either an architecture update that we think will be higher reliability or some product experience. So most folks, that's what we talk about a lot. It's fun lunchtime conversations, but I don't think we over optimize because there's no perfect answer actually.
00:58:15 · Fiona Fung, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:58:15] S1: I haven't seen too many folks on our team. I think as everybody is just really excited about either an architecture update that we think will be higher reliability or some product experience. So most folks, that's what we talk about a lot. It's fun lunchtime conversations, but I don't think we over optimize because there's no perfect answer actually. [00:58:39] S0: There's too much to do. These are really interesting insights. Just like as the role transformed, things come, things go. So I'm curious what else has kind of lost in this new world of software engineering. I used to be an engineer. I don't know if you know this. I was an engineer for 10 years, and it was like so fun just to sit there inflow coding, this feeling just like, "Oh wow, it's working. Look at it compiled. It's amazing. I'm making progress." And now you don't do that anymore. You just sit there and kind of wait for agents to build the thing. What else is kind of lost in this new world for engineers?
00:58:39 · Lenny Rachitsky, Fiona Fung
[00:58:39] S0: There's too much to do. These are really interesting insights. Just like as the role transformed, things come, things go. So I'm curious what else has kind of lost in this new world of software engineering. I used to be an engineer. I don't know if you know this. I was an engineer for 10 years, and it was like so fun just to sit there inflow coding, this feeling just like, "Oh wow, it's working. Look at it compiled. It's amazing. I'm making progress." And now you don't do that anymore. You just sit there and kind of wait for agents to build the thing. What else is kind of lost in this new world for engineers? [00:59:12] S1: It's so funny. I just had that conversation with the engineer and the team of talking about flow. Remember the old days you have this really gnarly problem and you pop that music soundtrack in, and then you're just in the zone? So yeah, and then there was always that big aha moment at the end I would remember. You remember being like, "You finally cracked it. Yay." So we do, but I think now we get a lot of joy from the product, but I do think because I hear from other engineers as well of well, some of the hardest parts is what I used to enjoy. Yeah, I heard that from another engineer as well, and so I think we're all just kind of shifting, but I do see the thing and that's why I was talking about the pairwise programming and the hackathon, that did recently come up more. Folks were starting to feel like it started to be a lonely experience.