Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:02:21 · Lenny Rachitsky, Noam Segal
[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. [01:02:33] S0: I'm not objective because I'm part of the research community and the design community. If I may, I just want to tell people that ... In this community that I truly and honestly believe that there's never been a more important time for our roles to manifest in the products that we build. You've talked about this with many people, Lenny, in previous interviews about concept like taste, about concepts like craft, about concepts like quality. I'm thinking of people like Karri Linear's CEO who talked so beautifully about the importance of quality and how you build products. I'm thinking about people like- [01:03:23] S1: Katie Dill comes to mind. We had a whole conversation around taste and beauty and about [inaudible 01:03:28]- [01:03:28] S0: Katie Dill. Recently Jenny Wen who leads design for Claude at Anthropic. And so many other people who talk about the importance of taste of judgment of design. So I honestly hope that designers and researchers make a comeback when it comes to how they feel about this industry. Because the industry needs them. The industry needs us. And so I hope we see a change next year. And this is the call to all designers and researchers to get in there and do our thing because it's incredibly valuable at this era.
01:03:28 · Noam Segal, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:03:28] S0: Katie Dill. Recently Jenny Wen who leads design for Claude at Anthropic. And so many other people who talk about the importance of taste of judgment of design. So I honestly hope that designers and researchers make a comeback when it comes to how they feel about this industry. Because the industry needs them. The industry needs us. And so I hope we see a change next year. And this is the call to all designers and researchers to get in there and do our thing because it's incredibly valuable at this era. [01:04:08] S1: Yeah. I've had a few conversations recently about just design. And in particular just why is design not a huge value add and differentiator today knowing AI is just so bad at it? We just had the head of the Codex app on talking about why AI ... Like AI is not good at design. And you could clearly tell AI designed this thing. And you would think this was the moment for design to become such a value add and differentiator for companies, seeing all this AI slop that's being produced. So I'm optimistic that'll emerge as people are like, I'm so sick and tired of all these generic things. I want to actually build something great.