Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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
[00:43:26] S1: Who says hiring has to be fair? Every founder and hiring manager I've been speaking with these days is feeling the same pressure. Hire the best people as fast as possible, but recruiting is time-consuming, alignment is hard, and competition for great talent keeps getting tighter. That's why teams like ElevenLabs, Brex, Replit, Deal, and 5000 other organizations use Metaview, the AI company giving high-performance teams a real, unfair advantage in hiring. They give you a suite of AI agents that behave like recruiting coworkers. They find candidates for you based on your exact criteria, take interview notes automatically, gather insights across your hiring process, and help you identify the best candidates in your pipeline. AI handles the recruiting toil and gives you a real source or truth. That means our [inaudible 00:44:17] and a team focused on what matters most, winning the right candidates. Don't let your competitors out-hire you. Metaview customers close roles 30% faster. Try Metaview today for free and get an extra month of sourcing at Metaview.AI/Lenny. That's M-E-T-A View dot AI slash Lenny. You talked about how you're enjoying coding more. I actually did this little informal survey on Twitter. I don't know if you saw this where I just asked ... I did three different polls. I asked engineers, "Are you enjoying your job more or less since adopting AI tools?" And then I did a separate one for PMs, and one for designers. And both engineers and PMs, 70% of people said they are enjoying their job more. And about 10% said they're enjoying their job less. Designers, interestingly, only 55% said they are enjoying their job more, and 20% said they're enjoying their job less. I thought that was really interesting.
00:45:11 · Boris Cherny, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:45:11] S0: That's super interesting. I'd love to talk to these people, both in the more bucket and the less bucket just to understand. Did you get to follow up with any of them? [00:45:20] S1: A few people replied, and we're actually doing a followup poll that we'll look to in the show notes of going deeper into some of the stuff. But a lot ... There's the factors that make it more fun and less fun. The designers, they didn't share a lot actually of just the people that [inaudible 00:45:33]. I actually asked just like, "Why are you enjoying your job less?" I didn't hear a lot. So, I'm curious what's going on there. [00:45:37] S0: Yeah. I'm seeing this a little bit with ... At Anthropic, I think everyone is fairly technical. This is something that we screen for when people join. There's a lot of technical interviews that people go through even for non-technical functions. And our designers largely code. So, I think for them this is something that they have enjoyed from what I've seen, because now instead of bugging engineers they can just go in and code. And even some designers that didn't code before have just started to do it, and for them it's great, because they can unblock themselves. But I'd be really interested just to hear more people's experiences, because I bet it's not uniform like that.
00:45:37 · Boris Cherny, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:45:37] S0: Yeah. I'm seeing this a little bit with ... At Anthropic, I think everyone is fairly technical. This is something that we screen for when people join. There's a lot of technical interviews that people go through even for non-technical functions. And our designers largely code. So, I think for them this is something that they have enjoyed from what I've seen, because now instead of bugging engineers they can just go in and code. And even some designers that didn't code before have just started to do it, and for them it's great, because they can unblock themselves. But I'd be really interested just to hear more people's experiences, because I bet it's not uniform like that. [00:46:18] S1: Yeah. So, maybe if you're listening to this leave a comment if you're finding your job is less fun, and you're enjoying your job less, because what you're saying and what I'm hearing from most people, 70% of PMs and engineers are loving their job more. Like, if you're [inaudible 00:46:30] bucket, you could ... Something's going on.