Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:38:19 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:38:19] S1: So, the big question, which you're alluding to is jobs and job loss, and things like that. There's this concept of Jevons paradox of just as we can do more, we hire more, and it's not actually as scary as it looks. What have you experienced so far I guess with AI becoming a big part of the engineering job? Are you hiring more than if you didn't have AI? And just thoughts on jobs.
00:38:41 · Boris Cherny
[00:38:41] S0: Yeah. For our team we're hiring. So, Claude Code team is hiring. If you're interested just check out the jobs page on Anthropic. Personally, it's all this stuff has just made me enjoy my work more. I have never enjoyed coding as much as I do today, because I don't have to deal with all the minutia. So, for me, personally, it's been quite exciting. This is something that we hear from a lot of customers where they love the tool, they love Claude Code, because it just makes coding delightful again, and that's just so fun for them. But it's hard to know where this thing is going to go. And, again, I have to reach for these historical analogs. And I think the printing press is just such a good one, because what happened is this technology that was locked away to a small set of people, like, knowing how to read and write became accessible to everyone. It was just inherently democratizing. Everyone started to be able to do this. And if that wasn't the case then something like the Renaissance just could never have happened, because a lot if the Renaissance, it was about knowledge spreading. It was about written records that people use to communicate. Because there were no phones or anything like this. There was no internet at the time. So, it's about what does this enable next? And I think that's the very optimistic version of it for me, and that's the part that I'm really excited about. It's just unimaginable. We couldn't be talking today, if the printing press hadn't been invented. Like, our microphones wouldn't exist. None of the things around us would exist. It just wouldn't be possible to coordinate such a large group of people if that wasn't the case. And so, I imagine a world a few years in the future where everyone is able to program, and what does that unlock? Anyone can just build software any time. And I have no idea. It's just the same way that in the 1400s, no one could have predicted this. I think it's the same way. But I do think in the meantime, it's going to be very disruptive, and it's going to be painful for a lot of people. And, again, as a society, this is a conversation that we have to have, and this is a thing that we have to figure out together.
00:40:42 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:40:42] S1: So, for folks hearing this that want to succeed and make it in this crazy turmoil we're entering, any advice? Is it play with AI tools? Get really proficient at the latest stuff? Is there anything else that you recommend to help people stay ahead?
00:40:58 · Boris Cherny
[00:40:58] S0: Yeah. I think that's pretty much it. Experiment with the tools, get to know them, don't be scared of them. Just dive in, try them, be on the bleeding edge, be on the frontier. And maybe the second piece of advice is try to be a generalist more than you have in the past. For example, in school, a lot of people that study CS, they learn to code, and they don't really learn much else. Maybe they learn a little bit of systems architecture or something like this. But some of the most effective engineers that I work with every day, and some of the most effective product managers and so on, they cross over disciplines. So, on the Claude Code team everyone codes. Our product manager codes, our engineering manager codes, our designer codes, our finance guy codes, our data scientist codes. Everyone on the team codes. And then if I look at particular engineers, people often cross different disciplines. So, some of the strongest engineers are hybrid, product, and infrastructure engineers, or product engineers with really great design sense, and they're able to do design also. Or an engineer that has a really good sense of the business, and can use that to figure out what to do next, or an engineer that also loves talking to users and can just really channel what users want to figure out what's next. So, I think a lot of the people that will be rewarded the most over the next few years they won't just be AI native, and they don't just know how to use these tools really well, but also they're curious and they're generalists, and they cross over multiple disciplines and can think about the broader problem they're solving rather than just the engineering part of it.
00:42:29 · Lenny Rachitsky, Boris Cherny
[00:42:29] S1: Do you find these three separate disciplines still useful as a way to think about the team? Their engineering, design, product management, do you find those ... Even though, they are now coding and contributing to thinking about what to build do you feel like those are three roles that will persist long-term? At least, at this point. [00:42:46] S0: I think in the short-term it'll persist, but one thing that we're starting to see is there's maybe a 50% overlap in those roles where a lot of people are actually just doing the same thing, and some people have specialties. For example, I code a little bit more [inaudible 00:42:58] Kat, our PM, does a little bit more coordination or planning or forecasting, or things like this. [00:43:04] S1: Stakeholder alignment. [00:43:06] S0: Stakeholder alignment. Exactly. I do think that there is a future where I think by the end of the year what we're going to start to see is these start to get even murkier where I think in some places the title software engineer is going to start to go away, and it's just going to be replaced by builder or maybe it's just everyone is going to be a product manager and everyone codes, or something like this.
00:43:26 · Lenny Rachitsky
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