Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:59:12 · Fiona Fung, Lenny Rachitsky
[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. [01:00:07] S0: So interesting. Within Anthropic, I'm curious, so engineering the most transformed I think of any role right now, what's the second most transformed role so far would you say within Anthropic that's most different from how was like a couple years ago, let's say?
01:00:07 · Lenny Rachitsky, Fiona Fung
[01:00:07] S0: So interesting. Within Anthropic, I'm curious, so engineering the most transformed I think of any role right now, what's the second most transformed role so far would you say within Anthropic that's most different from how was like a couple years ago, let's say? [01:00:23] S1: It's all the coding adjacent roles are shifting. I know you were chatting with Kat, I think PM is also transformed quite a bit because PM are no longer bottlenecked if they have an idea waiting on engineering bandwidth. So that's kind of like the next role that I saw on shift. Actually, our PMs have also helped us roll up sleeves and help shift some features when there was something we wanted to do, and an engineer wasn't able to. So I think it's all the coding adjacent roles are starting to shift, but I think that's where again, the verification is important because when you have more different disciplines checking in, how do we make sure everybody has higher confidence? I also think we need to do more to keep automating these other portions of the workflows. For sure, we focus a lot on coding, but next when you think about design or data science, those are starting to be the next areas that I think are good opportunities for us to see how we can start improving the experiences there as well.
01:01:26 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:01:26] S0: Yeah, speaking of data science, I have a data science friend and he was just saying how data science is so different now where now most of their job is people doing their own not amazing data science work using AI, and then just showing it to the data scientists, "Here, here's the analysis I did. Can you just make sure it's right?" And half the time it's not right, and so the job is just a whole different job now instead of doing the work that they thought they wanted to do. Now it's like, "All right, I'm just reviewing all this AI data science all the time. What the hell?" Along the lines, coming back to just how your team operates and how things are changing, let me see if something comes with this question. What should an engineering manager expect from their team now versus a couple of years ago, what's a normal, I don't know, baseline expectation of how things should work other than just we're shipping faster, is there anything else?