Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:04:08 · Lenny Rachitsky, Noam Segal
[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. [01:04:43] S0: Yeah. And moreover, if I recall correctly, you in that conversation talked about how some of the issues around AI doing design are perhaps tractable problems. But some of them are even intractable, I would say. Or definitely much, much harder to solve for. It's still the case that creating incredible, novel, creative experiences, not something that this technology is quite capable of. So we'll see what happens. But I really do hope that the design and research community turn around and change their minds about the industry next year.
01:04:43 · Noam Segal, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:04:43] S0: Yeah. And moreover, if I recall correctly, you in that conversation talked about how some of the issues around AI doing design are perhaps tractable problems. But some of them are even intractable, I would say. Or definitely much, much harder to solve for. It's still the case that creating incredible, novel, creative experiences, not something that this technology is quite capable of. So we'll see what happens. But I really do hope that the design and research community turn around and change their minds about the industry next year. [01:05:20] S1: Yeah, man, I can't wait to do next year already. What's it going to be? But if you actually look at the losing my job to AI bucket, there's actually a role that is even more worried about losing their job and I believe that is data analytics. Our shades are kind of very similar to keep the message clear. But that's really interesting, that data analysts basically are the most worried about losing their job. [01:05:43] S0: I think we're seeing incredible capabilities come out. [01:05:49] S1: That makes sense. Makes sense.
01:05:49 · Lenny Rachitsky, Noam Segal
[01:05:49] S1: That makes sense. Makes sense. [01:05:50] S0: Yeah, with the different models out there to run data analysis. I'm seeing this in the research realm as well. I would suggest that we're also seeing incredible advancements in coding. So I was expecting engineering to be higher in certain places here and it's not. But again, this isn't about the objective reality of how far AI has come in terms of its capabilities doing each of these roles. This is about how people are feeling in these roles and there isn't a one-to-one correlation between those things. [01:06:28] S1: Speaking of that, let's talk about who the happiest people are. Who's doing great? [01:06:33] S0: Oh, yes. [01:06:33] S1: Who's doing best?
01:06:34 · Noam Segal
[01:06:34] S0: So the happiest people in tech, this is something that did not change between last year's survey and this year's. It's still founders and people who are working in smaller companies. And I do feel the need to say that when it comes to founders, to your point earlier, not that I know, but being a founder is an incredibly challenging, all encompassing job. And there is a certain selection bias here in the sense that these are people who are currently in the active role of a founder in a startup that is still running. Rather than founders who had to shut down their startup or whatever it might be. So I just want to make that clear around who we're looking at. But yes, when we look at founders and when we look at, in this case, you're looking at company size as well, you can see that whether it's optimism, whether it's burnout, layoff worry, or whether people would recommend their job. You are just seeing these increases or decreases depending on the question. It's very clear that founders are top of nearly every measure. They're 71% optimistic. They're enjoying their jobs the most. They have the lowest burnout, the lowest layoff worry, the most AI excitement. It's a medium-sized effect compared to other effects we saw, but very significant. And that said, if we talk about founders, even having that ownership and even having that agency has its limits. Many founders are still moderately or at least moderately burnt out, 47% of founders. And as we said earlier, even founders aren't very likely to recommend being a founder to other people right now, which is very interesting.