Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:00:00 · Noam Segal, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:00:00] S0: Bad news for the tech community. [00:00:03] S1: Burnout at work is a major problem and AI could add to this already overwhelmed employee problem. [00:00:10] S0: The honeymoon period with AI is over. When people are asked, "What are you afraid of?" losing my job to AI is actually second to last. What we saw rise up to the top is the expectation to do more for the same pay. [00:00:25] S1: We did this survey on how people are feeling in tech right now. Burnout is increasing significantly. Optimism is declining. It's never been crazier. [00:00:37] S0: When are we going to get to the optimistic parts of this episode? Half of the people in tech are feeling incredible, and the other half... Then she told us, "My brain is rotting. My work feels worse." [00:00:52] S1: Elon had this really interesting way of describing it. We're definitely living in a simulation if we are alive right now, when we're about to start building data centers in space and AI is going to be as smart as human. What does this tell us we should be doing, if we can do anything? [00:01:04] S0: We're in the second inning of a massive shift. No one knows how it will end, but all you can do is...
00:01:04 · Noam Segal, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:01:04] S0: We're in the second inning of a massive shift. No one knows how it will end, but all you can do is... [00:01:13] S1: Today, my guest is Noam Segal. Noam and I go a long ways back. We worked together at Airbnb for many years where he was my research partner. Since then, he went on to be a research leader at Intercom, Twitter, Wealthfront, Meta, Zapier, and Figma. Noam is so amazing. And over the past couple years, I've been lucky to partner with him on a bunch of research projects, the most ambitious of which has been a tech worker sentiment survey, which we plan to run every year. This is the second time we've run it, and the results are so interesting. I believe this is the largest survey of its kind, looking at how people in tech feel about their jobs and AI and layoffs and burnout, and the future of their careers. There's so much in this, and basically this episode is a conversation about the results. At the end of the conversation, we go through a bunch of advice on what you might do if you are currently on the struggle bus, and trying to figure out what to do. I'm so excited for this episode. I'm so excited for this report. A big thank you to Noam for doing the work to create the survey, run the survey, analyze the survey, and write the post that we will link to. It is so good. [00:02:41] S0: Thank you so much, Lenny. It's such an incredible experience to be here. Thanks for having me.
00:02:41 · Noam Segal, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:02:41] S0: Thank you so much, Lenny. It's such an incredible experience to be here. Thanks for having me. [00:02:46] S1: It's my pleasure. We've actually worked together for a long time, and a few people know this. You were the researcher on our team when I was at Airbnb. It was like 10 years ago. [00:02:56] S0: Oh, decades ago. A decade ago, Lenny. So much has changed. [00:02:57] S1: So much has changed. [00:02:59] S0: So much has changed. [00:03:02] S1: Which is a great segue to what we're going to be talking about today, which is we did this survey on how people are feeling in tech right now. It's never been crazier. And so, we did this report on just how are people feeling? And this is the second time we've done this. We ran this a year ago. An idea here is we're going to have this yearly tech sentiment survey that's going to track how tech people are feeling. Before we get into the takeaways, give us a little context just on this survey, how you ran it, what were we looking at? Anything people need to know?
00:03:02 · Lenny Rachitsky, Noam Segal
[00:03:02] S1: Which is a great segue to what we're going to be talking about today, which is we did this survey on how people are feeling in tech right now. It's never been crazier. And so, we did this report on just how are people feeling? And this is the second time we've done this. We ran this a year ago. An idea here is we're going to have this yearly tech sentiment survey that's going to track how tech people are feeling. Before we get into the takeaways, give us a little context just on this survey, how you ran it, what were we looking at? Anything people need to know? [00:03:34] S0: Yeah, so to your point, this is the second time we're running this survey, which I really feel is unique in the tech industry. I appreciate you for giving me the opportunity and giving us an opportunity, as a community, to learn more about how we're all feeling in tech. I'm not aware of any survey like this, at this scale, Looking at these things. Last year when we ran the similar tech sentiment, the first inaugural tech sentiment survey, the title was Burnt Out But Optimistic. We were seeing fairly high levels of burnout, but also fairly good levels of optimism about where things are going. And we actually followed up on the burnout point and we created the Armor Framework, if you remember. And I'm really glad we did that. This year we surveyed about 6000 people from product, engineering, design, research, pretty much any role, marketing, pretty much any role in tech. And the results were very interesting. So I'm very excited to jump into them.
00:03:34 · Noam Segal, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:03:34] S0: Yeah, so to your point, this is the second time we're running this survey, which I really feel is unique in the tech industry. I appreciate you for giving me the opportunity and giving us an opportunity, as a community, to learn more about how we're all feeling in tech. I'm not aware of any survey like this, at this scale, Looking at these things. Last year when we ran the similar tech sentiment, the first inaugural tech sentiment survey, the title was Burnt Out But Optimistic. We were seeing fairly high levels of burnout, but also fairly good levels of optimism about where things are going. And we actually followed up on the burnout point and we created the Armor Framework, if you remember. And I'm really glad we did that. This year we surveyed about 6000 people from product, engineering, design, research, pretty much any role, marketing, pretty much any role in tech. And the results were very interesting. So I'm very excited to jump into them. [00:04:40] S1: Yeah, just remember when you shared the first draft of the analysis, I was just reading it. I was like, "Holy shit, this is so interesting." And it just feels like it's putting words to the way I feel, the way that I hear a lot of people feel. So I'm really excited that we're doing this.
00:06:13 · Noam Segal
[00:06:13] S0: Well, first I'll say that you and I both noticed an incredible post from Elena Verna a couple of days before this pod was recorded. And, she's talking about the AI confidence theater, and how in conversations these days in tech, everything is dead, first of all. Engine coding is dead, design is dead, SaaS is dead, et cetera. Obviously that's not true. So what you're about to see in these results is the best picture we could provide, and probably the best picture anyone's provided so far, of how people are really feeling about AI. And to me, this also ties to the fact that, if you're watching this and you work in tech, you probably answer some sort of biannual culture Amp style survey about how you are feeling, but the questions don't really dive any deeper than the effectiveness of your manager or leadership at the company you work at. Whereas, the big picture in this survey, and I think the thing that stood out to us the most, is how bifurcated the workforce is right now. And what you're going to see is that AI has an outlier level, outsize impact, on how people feel about their work more so than any other characteristic of their job, whether it's their role, the company they work for, the company size, their level, et cetera. Half of the people in tech are feeling incredible; energized, amplified, excited about the technology and the future of their role. And the other half feel like the future is unclear, they feel destabilized, they feel diminished, other negative emotions around that. It's a very interesting picture that really cuts the tech workforce in half, and that's what we'll see in a second.