Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:53:03 · Noam Segal
[00:53:03] S0: Yeah. So I think the dominant narrative right now in our community is the fear of being replaced. And as we talked about, a lot of people in tech do fear and are worried that they're going to be replaced, that they're going to be laid off. And so it would make sense that if we had a question and one of the options to respond to that question were, I'm worried about losing my job to AI, that it would rank fairly high. But when we look at this slide and when we look at when people are asked, what are your concerns and what's bothering you right now? What are you afraid of in tech? Losing my job to AI is actually second to last on that list. And instead what we saw rise up to the top is the expectation to do more for the same pay. It's almost as if we're all feeling like we're being squeezed and squeezed and squeezed some more to accomplish more things in less time for the same pay. And so that fear of being overworked is by far the dominant fear. Alongside the second item in this list, which is that the pace is becoming unsustainable. And by pace, I mean both the pace of the work. And the expectation of work velocity, just how much you have to put out a day, every single day. And the pace of change of the technology. Which requires you to invest a significant amount of time in learning the new model, the new framework, the new way to use the technology. Which of course takes away from your core focused working time. So it's sort of an evil downward spiral that really prevents you from feeling like you're able to accomplish anything of meaning. You just feel very overworked, very tired.
00:55:10 · Lenny Rachitsky, Noam Segal
[00:55:10] S1: I'm confident everybody listening understands exactly what you're describing here. Obviously connects to that burnout point we made earlier. I'll close this takeaway with another quick read from your post. You're such an amazing writer, Noam. [00:55:25] S0: Thank you. [00:55:25] S1: I love reading your summaries of what you learned, so I'll just read this. The speed AI unlocked got plowed straight back into expectations. Every game becomes the new baseline and the people expected to hit it are running out of room to breathe. [00:55:40] S0: When are we going to get to the optimistic part of this episode? [00:55:46] S1: Maybe we'll find something. Okay, let's talk about takeaway six, which has a little bit of optimism. [00:55:51] S0: Oh, yeah. Okay. Okay. [00:55:52] S1: A lot of ambivalence is kind of the way to put it.
00:55:56 · Noam Segal
[00:55:56] S0: Yeah, I mentioned this earlier. The industry is definitely in a state of ambivalence. We try to capture all of the emotions that people are feeling at work right now. And I am happy to report, as you can see here, that the top two emotions are positive emotions, curiosity and excitement. And that's wonderful. That is optimistic. I'm glad that's the case. People are sharing that they're excited about the technology, about the capabilities, about what they're able to achieve. They're feeling curious about what the future might bring and what else they could do as these models and systems continue to evolve. So that's wonderful. But as you go down this list, you can see that there's this very interesting mix of positive, negative, and neutral emotions. People are also feeling overwhelmed. People are feeling conflicted. People are feeling relieved in certain ways about what AI has taken from them in a good sense, what they've been able to offload to AI. And then people are feeling tired, burnt out, just working hard and harder as we said, uneasy, anxious, and then hopeful. So as you can see, there is a wide variety of emotions here and it's really tough to figure out what exactly is going on. But one thing I definitely wanted to mention, which Nikhyl Singhal mentioned in an episode with you, I know he is a friend of the pod and such an incredible leader in product and in general in the tech community. He talks about smiling exhaustion. And I just love that term because I think it captures this ambivalence. The old type of emotion, the old type of burnout was just completely grim. It was all about these negative emotions that come from disengagement and exhaustion. Whereas now when Nikhyl talks about finding exhaustion, it's about people almost feeling reborn on the one hand. I'm shipping again, I'm building, I'm creating these incredible things with AI. There's never been a more exciting time. But there's no off switch. There's no off switch. And so the tempo is absolutely brutal. The rules keep rewriting themselves every single day. It's a very relentless pace. And so we're smiling through that exhaustion that we're feeling. And I think that captures the ambivalence more than anything really.
00:59:00 · Lenny Rachitsky, Noam Segal
[00:59:00] S1: I think it's also good to come back to one of the core points you made earlier that half of people are actually feeling very ... They are working very hard, probably exhausted at times. But they're also just really into ... They're going all in, feeling good, energized about where things are going. So I think it's important to always remember, Kevin, come back to that as we share all these negative elements. There's actually a large group of people that are actually loving this time and doing super well. [00:59:30] S0: There are. I think more than anything, what I would like to highlight here is that we tend to think of things way too often in black and white terms. We see people as either people who are just full of hype or people who are ... Is it doomers? Would that be the right? [00:59:50] S1: Yeah.
00:59:50 · Lenny Rachitsky, Noam Segal
[00:59:50] S1: Yeah. [00:59:51] S0: Or haters or whatever you want to call it. What we're seeing here is that, as always in life, if you ask me, things aren't as simple. Behind that facade, behind the theatrics that Elena Verna discussed. We all have both the hype person within us and the doomer to a certain extent. And the only difference between us is that we have different amounts of each. But we're not just one or the other. And there really is a ton of ambivalence. And I just want people to know that it's okay. It's okay to be excited and curious, but also feel overwhelmed. It's okay to feel believed and tired. It's okay to feel resentful. Even if all in all, you feel positive about the technology. Those emotions can coexist within us. It's very natural. Don't let this narrative that you're either/or to dominate and to convince you that anything's wrong with how you feel. Because really all of these emotions are very understandable given the times we're in. [01:00:59] S1: Such an important point. I love that you said that. Okay. So the next takeaway, what we did hear is when we were looking at this bifurcation that you found, we looked at just which functions are having the best time and worst time? And we had a hint at this earlier. And it turns out there's a couple that are just overall having the worst time right now and feel the least happy. So let's get into that.
01:00:59 · Lenny Rachitsky, Noam Segal
[01:00:59] S1: Such an important point. I love that you said that. Okay. So the next takeaway, what we did hear is when we were looking at this bifurcation that you found, we looked at just which functions are having the best time and worst time? And we had a hint at this earlier. And it turns out there's a couple that are just overall having the worst time right now and feel the least happy. So let's get into that. [01:01:24] S0: Yeah, so definitely, definitely. And we saw this last year, by the way, as well. We are seeing that designers and researchers are the most negative. And just to clarify what I mean by that, what you can see in this slide is that when it comes to AI identity shifts, designers and researchers are the highest in feeling either destabilized or diminished. When it comes to emotions like feeling tired, overwhelmed or anxious, researchers and designers lead the pack in a negative way, of course. When it comes to worries about losing one's job to AI, again, researchers and designers are pretty much as high as one can be. And then finally, when it comes to these NPS-like scores of whether people would recommend their role to a friend or to a colleague, researchers and designers are the least likely to recommend entering their role at this point. [01:02:21] S1: We talked about this earlier. I don't know how much more there's to add here. Basically again, it's not that this function is in big trouble necessarily. It's this is how people in that function are feeling right now.