Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:19:07 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:19:07] S1: It still boggles my mind. Everyone's like, "Oh, what's the cutting edge and all of that." I think there's still, I don't know if this is true even today, but very recently there were more lines of COBOL than I think any other language out there. Mainframe sales continue to do pretty well and they're unusually large line item for companies like IBM. Part of the reason why these systems... I think I spent an hour and a half trying to get my MileagePlus account on United to work correctly with my daughter's phone and all this other stuff, partly because these systems are so complicated, but they're built in mainframes. A lot of the engineers, and this is going to sound morbid, but I think it's true, a lot of the engineers are dead. They literally are passed away. They were written 10, 20 years ago and going in and touching that code is probably the last thing anyone wants to do, so nobody goes in there. It's all that side. Now, we can change that. I'm very excited about what it means to go in and improve things that people take for granted. That's a big one. That's a bit of an aside. I think that the other thing that I think is worth signaling is, I think that the way the skills that you need to be effective in today's world is an acceleration of what we were talking about last episode. We were talking about ICs, we were talking about hands-on, we're talking about opinion, even back then, before Claude and ChatGPT and others came out. I think what we're now seeing is companies are looking very, very carefully at their staffing and they're asking themselves, one, do we need this many people? Did we overhire? Part of the reason is they're looking, "Hey, maybe we doubled our staff in the last five years." Lots of companies that are public have done that. "Did we get twice as much for them?" It was funny, when I was at Google, now over 10, 15 years ago, we used to ask ourselves, I was on an ancillary team. I wasn't in the search or the ads team. We used to ask ourselves, "How many people are really needed for Google to hit their numbers?" They were like, at that time, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 people. If you ask someone who wasn't in tech, you're like, "Oh, probably 90% of those folks, obviously." The answer's probably closer to 9%. Probably you need 500 people to keep the lights on and to build that business.
00:21:52 · Nikhyl Singhal
You don't need 25,000, 30,000, 40,000 people. There's a huge amount of overhead where companies hire not just because they want to have bureaucrats, because they want to expand, they want to try new things. But I think that there's a judgment day that's come back where companies are like, "Look, we aren't getting as much for the staff that we grew in the last five years. This AI thing requires a totally different skillset." The combination is going to mean, this year I predict in the next 12 to 24 months, we're going to see massive shedding of staffs and then massive rehiring. But you might see a company shed 30,000 and hire 8,000, but the 8,000 people they're going to hire are going to all be AI first. The 30,000 they're going to let go of are going to be in combination of, we didn't get as much for those folks that we needed and we want to set the destination differently with a much lighter payload, and that's dark. That's going to make this year and the next year going to be pretty, pretty challenging. I'll transition a little bit to my thoughts on people, but I'll pause for a second to see if this resonates with you.
00:23:13 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikhyl Singhal
[00:23:13] S0: That's scary to hear. We're going to talk about what folks listening can do to do their best to be in that second bucket of being rehired and kept, because there's a lot you can do. There's a lot of people that know they need to change and adjust and they're not doing anything. Now we want to talk about maybe some of the blockers there. One thing I'll note is, I should have mentioned this earlier, I just did this report on the job market. Interestingly, as of today at least, we have the most open PM roles globally at tech companies in three plus years. The last time it was this high was during COVID, basically. There are some good news there at least for the PM role. I don't know. [00:23:56] S1: Did that surprise you, Lenny? [00:23:58] S0: Yeah, it did, because there's always this sense that, why do we need PMs? What's the point? We have AI to just built stuff, and like- It's the, why do we need PMs? What's the point? We have AI to just build stuff. And my sense, I've always been saying this, I feel like the PM skill is the most important, valuable skill of all the skills. And I know every role thinks this about their role. It's like, no, design. We design more than anything now. But I feel like what you said where it's the deciding what to build, deciding if this is good and great and ready and prioritizing, I feel like that's what remains. So to me, it makes sense.
00:24:29 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:24:29] S1: [inaudible 00:24:29] report came out in a fortuitous time because it was right before I was preparing to come on this show. And the three points I was going to make is builders are going to have the time in their lives. Comps actually up and the Bay Area is essentially back in favor. And I think those three things came very much loud and clear in your report. And I think the question around, hey, why are product managers doing so well? Why are there so many jobs? When in reality, a lot of product people that all of us know are struggling to find a role or we're hearing about these layoffs. I think it depends on how you define what a product manager is. And I think that for the first time, I think that we did have a dramatic shift in what's defined. We three years ago talked about, "Hey, product managers, there's lots of archetypes. Some archetypes are actually more in favor. This was the IC conversation, the builder conversation." Now what we're essentially saying is the information mover is essentially going to become a dinosaur. And I think about half of the product people that grew into the industry have that skill and superpower. And then there were a set of people who got into product because they like to build stuff. And folks like yourself who were a founder who that was sort of the motivation into joining the industry, and then they found themselves into this thing called product management. Those folks are builders. And those people are the ones that are being hired by your survey. I think those product managers, everybody wants a builder. And I think that interestingly, lots of engineers are builders, lots of designers are builders, lots of marketing folks are builders. And I think Builders Wanted is going to be the big tagline for the next couple of years. And it is so fun to build. I'll bet you, and this is a prediction, that if you had to choose between preparing a podcast and sitting in Codex or sitting in Claude Code and working on your laptop, you would prefer the latter.
00:26:46 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:26:46] S0: It is so fun. Yeah. Just like progress. You just make so much [inaudible 00:26:49]. It's like, look at this thing go. It's getting better. It's just getting better.
00:26:51 · Nikhyl Singhal, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:26:51] S1: I mean, when I was a PM, I used to take a break and go change the light bulbs in the house. And the reason why I would change the light bulbs is that light bulb was broken, but then I replaced it and the light came on. And man, was that satisfying? Because in a product job, there is very few days of satisfaction because you don't really have the ability to see something broken that gets fixed. It's just part of the challenge in having responsibility without authority until now. Now you can participate in the joy. You can create a design. You don't have to wait for the designer and convince the designer to go and actually work through this or to put your stuff on a backlog. You don't have to do that. And so I think that the builders are going to have the time of their lives, and I think they're going to be very focused on judgment. I think that they're going to invade other functions. I think there's going to be... When I started the group five years ago, we had, for the first two to three years, until we got to about 60, 70 people in this community of head of products, we had one founder. In the last 12 months, as we've gone to about 125, we have 14 founders. 14 people essentially have decided that their next job was not to take another product executive role, but to found. Founding CEO is now open to us. I have one person, very senior person in my group who interviewed for a CHRO position because they wanted a product manager background for the CHRO position. [00:28:46] S0: What is CHRO?