Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:08:22 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:08:22] S1: It feels so like, yes, this feels correct as we look at people in tech. It just is so clear that this happening. And what's interesting is it's fifty fifty in the results. I didn't expect to be so even. That was a really interesting takeaway.
00:08:36 · Noam Segal
[00:08:36] S0: It's 50-50. When you dive a little bit deeper into the data, there is some nuance there. So we're looking at this slide with the question that you and I both decided to answer the survey, which is how has AI shifted your professional identity, if at all? And I'll actually call out, first of all, that only 3% of people reported that AI hasn't shifted their identity. So clearly AI has changed how we each view ourselves. That's first of all. But then to your point, the most prominent thing here is that 50% of people in tech are feeling amplified. They feel like they can do more. They feel like they can do better. It's a wholly positive emotion, and it's great. It's great for them. But the other half of tech divide into three distinct groups. The first group is people who feel like their role is being redefined. That group doesn't actually have that much clarity or specific positive or negative emotions around what's happening. They just don't really understand it. It's a very mixed bag type of emotion, where it's very clear to me that my role is fundamentally changing, but I don't really know what it means. And that's 27% of our sample. Then, as we go down the line, we have two groups who have clear negative emotions around what's going on. The first group, 14% of people feel destabilized. The ground is shaking beneath them. They have very little clarity on what's going on. They have high anxiety levels. They report having very negative and pessimistic views of what's to come. And then, 5% of people feel diminished. They feel like the great powers of AI have taken something away from them, and something that obviously is never going to come back, because what's the saying, AI and AI models are the worst today that they'll ever be. They're only getting better. So people who feel diminished now will only feel more diminished in the future, probably.
00:10:57 · Lenny Rachitsky, Noam Segal
[00:10:57] S1: Super. So following that thread- [00:10:59] S0: Sorry for the bad news. [00:11:00] S1: Sorry for the bad news. There's some good news here. So following that thread, these buckets correlate super strongly with, basically every other measure of how people are doing. See this kind of regression on just every other core question you asked, and it's so interesting to see how connected these are.