Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:49:08 · Lenny Rachitsky, Marc Andreessen
[00:49:08] S1: By the way, I was going to say, I was a big Perl programmer. I was an engineer for 10 years, and that was my language of choice. [00:49:14] S0: Do you remember? I don't know when you were doing it, but do you remember... At least early on, did you ever hit this where C coders were looking down their nose at you and being like- [00:49:23] S1: For sure. It was like, "This is so slow. It's not going to scale. What are you spending all your time on this thing?" [00:49:27] S0: Yeah, exactly. And of course, and again, it started this thing where they were sort of correct. Which is, at the beginning, it wasn't fast enough or whatever. By the end, they were definitely wrong, which is it got much better, much faster. And it swept the world. Most coding today happens as scripting languages. And then by the way, along the way, the people who really understood the scripting languages and the people who understood all the lower level systems, they were the ones who were able to actually make the scripting languages actually work really well. And so, that was a great example of this kind of adaptation. And again, the result of that was a far higher number of people writing code with scripting languages than were ever writing code with lower level languages. And I think this will just be a more dramatic version of that. [00:50:04] S1: I love that Perl was designed by a linguist. I don't know if you remember that part. And that's what made it so nice to code with. [00:50:10] S0: That's funny because, of course, it was so notorious for being impossible to understand.
00:50:10 · Marc Andreessen, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:50:10] S0: That's funny because, of course, it was so notorious for being impossible to understand. [00:50:15] S1: How ironic.
00:50:17 · Marc Andreessen
[00:50:17] S0: Yes. Yeah, that's right. And again, here, this is a great example. So again, the task level of, like, "Design the perfect icon," is going to be, all right, the AI's going to do that all day long. If it gives you a thousand icon designs, it's going to be great. It's going to be fantastic, whatever. And by the way, there will still be some level of human icon design or whatever, but AI is going to get really good at that. But what are we trying to do, kind of capital D design of, like, "All right, what is this thing for, and how is this going to function in a world of human beings? And is this going to make people happy when they use it? Is this going to make people feel good about themselves? Is it going to fit into the rest of their life? Is it going to, I don't know, challenge them in the right way?" All of these kinds of higher level questions that the great designers have always thought about. The job of designer will involve much more of those higher level, more important components, and then again, with AI doing a lot more of the underlying tasks. And so one way to think about it is, I don't know, you think of the world's best designers, Jony Ive or whatever, and you could be like, "Wow." Like, if I'm a designer today, if I'm a 25-year-old designer and I aspire to be Jony Ive in a decade, it's all of a sudden, I have a new path that I can use to get there, which is... Because Jony did everything. He did it without AI. Now, a young designer tends to be like, "Wow, if I really harness AI in a decade, I'm going to be like the best designer of the world's ever seen because it's not just going to be me. It's going to be me, plus being so super empowered by this technology to be able to do so much more. And then so much more of my time and attention is going to be able to be focused on these higher-level things that most designers never get to." I think that's going to be another great example of that.
00:53:31 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:53:31] S1: So maybe what I'm hearing here is kind of this T-shaped strategy of if you want to be successful in any three of these roles, be very, very, very good at that specific role: product management, engineering design. And then get good enough at these other two roles.
00:53:45 · Marc Andreessen
[00:53:45] S0: I think that's great. I think that's really relevant. And then Scott Adams, firstly, just passed away, which is a real tragedy. But I referred for years to, actually, Scott Adams. He had this famous career advice he would give people, which I think makes a lot of sense. Which dovetails with what you're saying, which- ... advice he would give people which I think makes a lot of sense, which dovetails with what you're saying, which is he used to say it's like, look, he said, "I could have been a pretty good cartoonist or I could have been pretty good at business, but the fact that I was a cartoonist who understood business made me spectacularly great at making Dilbert." Because even the world's best cartoonist who didn't understand business could have never written Dilbert, and then the world's best business people who didn't know how to do cartoons couldn't have done Dilbert. It took somebody who actually had both of those skills to be able to make Dilbert which is one of the most successful cartoons in history. And so the way Scott always described it was that from a career development standpoint, the additive effect of being good at two things is more than double. The additive effect of being good at three things is more than triple because you become a super relevant specialist in the combination of the domains, and, look, I mean, you see this all over the economy. I mean, you see this all over the economy, but I'll give you an example. Hollywood, just Hollywood as an example. There are a lot of writers who can't direct a movie and they can be very successful writers. There are a lot of directors who can't write a movie. They can be very successful directors. But the superstars in the entertainment industry are the people who can write and direct. They don't have a term for those. They call us auteurors, and those are the people who are the real creative forces that move the field. And so again, and by the way, Hollywood, actually it's really funny, I've been spending a lot of time talking to Hollywood people about AI. Hollywood has the same Mexican stand-off going right now that we describe in tech, except in Hollywood, for example, for filmmaking, it's the director, it's the writer, and the actor.
00:55:32 · Marc Andreessen
Because the director is now thinking, "Wow, I don't need the writer anymore because the AI can write the script and I don't need the actor anymore because I can have AI actors." The writer is saying, "Well, I don't need the director because I can direct the movie and the AI can do the actors." And the actor is saying, "I don't need either one of these guys. I can have the AI direct the thing, I can have the AI write the thing and I'm just going to show up and do my performance." And so it's the same kind of triangular configuration, and again, what's great about it is they're all correct. Each person in each of those three fields is going to be able to expand laterally and pick up those additional skills, and then as a consequence, you're going to have more people who can write and direct or write and act or direct and act or do all three. I think to your point, your T-shaped thing, I think that's going to be true basically across the entire economy. And if you think about the T, if you think about the T configuration, it's like, yeah, the breadth, the top of the T is like how many individual domains are you familiar enough with to be able to use the AI tools to be able to do really good work. And then this part of the T is how deep can you go in at least one of those domains so that you really, really deeply know what you're doing. But if you're super deep on coding and you can use AI to do design and you can use AI to do product management, that's your T right there, and you're a triple threat at the top of the T, but with this level of technical grounding underneath that. I mean, at that point, again, you're the super-powered individual, you're going to be able to just perform like sheets of magic, for example, in terms of designing and building your products that people in my generation couldn't have even dreamed of. And so I think that this is a universal kind of theory that I think can apply across the entire economy.