Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:28:49 · Lenny Rachitsky, Noam Segal
[00:28:49] S1: I don't know about growing up, but yes, I watched them early in my life. [00:28:52] S0: Oh my gosh, I love those movies, and I just can't help but wonder when the robots are coming for us. So incredible technology might be coming for us at some point. [00:29:04] S1: Skynet is being built right now. [00:29:07] S0: Skynet is coming. [00:29:08] S1: So there's going to be a really great takeaway around this before we get to that one actually. It's like every single one is so interesting. I'm just like, "Man, this one's interesting, but they're all interesting." Let's get to the next takeaway around people's sense of their own career, and whether they recommend it. [00:29:23] S0: This is a wild one for me because at least within the research community, I am known as the net promoter score hater. I even built a website dedicated to fighting NPS, npsistheworst.com. [00:29:39] S1: That an actual website? [00:29:40] S0: It's an actual website. Fun fact, by the way, I dislike NPS so much that I even brought to the domain npsisthebest.com, and I forward people from that to npsistheworst.com. That's how committed I am to fighting NPS. [00:29:58] S1: Amazing.
00:30:00 · Noam Segal
[00:30:00] S0: But you and I were both genuinely curious about whether people who are already a few years in and they may be senior or above senior in their roles, what would they say to the person entering the industry now? Or what would they say to a person considering entering the industry now? Would they recommend their role and the tech industry more broadly to a friend, or a relative of theirs? And the answer was shocking. Absolutely shocking. So let me show you the data around this, and let me preface this with a quick explanation on NPS because it's not so easy to understand. NPS is this question around whether you would recommend a product, or in this case your role to a friend or family member, right? And the scale goes from zero to 10, 10 being you would absolutely recommend your role, and zero being you would absolutely not recommend your role. But then NPS as a whole, when it's calculated, goes from minus 100, which is absolutely terrible, to plus 100. And the zero point represents neutrality, it represents that the sample as a whole is neutral. It's not a promoter to use NPS speak, meaning I would promote my role to other people. I would recommend it to other people. And they're not detractors either, which means I'm not negative about my role, so that's the zero point. What you are seeing here is that no one is a promoter of their role in tech right now, not even founders who are by far the happiest, happy-go-lucky people in tech right now. Founders would not recommend their roles. Neither would people in sales or go-to market, PMs, operations, engineering. And the worst of all, designers and researchers, my community are the least likely to recommend their role to other people coming into tech. It's sort of like saying, "I'm kind of swimming in this pool. The water's kind of okay, but you shouldn't come into these tech waters, they ain't for you."
00:32:33 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:32:33] S1: Oh my God, what an interesting takeaway and part of this research. So I'm just looking at this chart just as people are seeing this. Everyone's like, "Nope, don't do what I do." It's interesting. We're going to talk about how founders are the happiest people in tech, but still it's a very stressful, hard job. I'm surprised it's the least. You would think many founders would be like, "This is the craziest, gnarliest job. You should not do this, it sucks." But it's interesting they're the least likely to recommend.
00:33:08 · Noam Segal
[00:33:08] S0: There's a strong narrative right now that there's never been a better time to be a founder. You're a lot less reliant on other people to build. There's a ton of conversations around the solopreneur or the duopreneur. There's a ton of conversations around how this is the era to be a founder. And yet people who are currently in that role aren't very excited about recommending it to other people. There's also another layer to this, which is as you go down in seniority, you are less likely to recommend your role. So execs, VPs, maybe even directors are more likely to recommend their role than people who are ICs. That's an interesting one, I've seen all sorts of explanations for that. One explanation, for example, is that at the top of the pyramid, VPs are benefiting more from AI because they're getting all of this stream of information and knowledge being processed by AI, making their jobs a lot easier, whereas ICs are each scrambling to build all of these micro SaaS products within the companies they work for. No one knows what anyone else is doing. There's a lot of duplicative work. It's a lot easier to build products these days, but a lot harder to maintain them. And so I think a lot of ICs are feeling like, there's a saying, full gas on neutral. You are pushing the pedal to the metal in your car, but you're in neutral gear, you're not going anywhere. I think that's the feeling that a lot of ICs are having these days with these technologies. I keep building these things, but I'm not having the impact I want. Everyone else is building too. There's lots of confusion, and it's just not worth it anymore.
00:35:13 · Lenny Rachitsky, Noam Segal
[00:35:13] S1: There's this interesting also trend, there's this whole meme of don't become part of the permanent underclass. And I feel like there's a few of these threads throughout this. And here it's like, "Okay, I'm a PM, but it's too late. Don't do this. The door is closing for this role. Things are changing." And it's not just PM, it's every role. Everyone's just like, "Maybe should do something else." [00:35:36] S0: Yeah, I would agree with that, and I think it's unfortunate. I feel like in the past, people were pushed to CS to learn to code. I know that these days, for myself as a parent, I don't know what to tell my kids to do anymore. I'm not sure what roles will be there for them in just a few years. These are very confusing times, and I think tech employees are feeling that as well. They don't understand what's in line for them in the future, so we certainly don't know to recommend to others like, "Yeah, in five years, it's going to be great." [00:36:21] S1: Get into plastics. It's like no one knows. It's just zoom out for a moment. It's so insane how much change we're living through right now. This is not a result we would've seen a year or two ago. This is so unstable and uncertain, and this is very new for people in tech, I think. [00:36:45] S0: Yeah. I like to use certain metaphors or examples from other areas in my life to explain these things, so I believe you spoke in the past to Scott Wu, the Co-Founder and CEO of Cognition. [00:37:08] S1: Devin.
00:37:08 · Lenny Rachitsky, Noam Segal
[00:37:08] S1: Devin. [00:37:09] S0: And they are the makers of Devin. And I recall that when he described the product, he talked about this ladder that the product progressed on. It went from a high school CS student to a college intern to a junior engineer, and at this point probably a senior or a staff level engineer. I would say that we are all watching this technology climb the rungs of this ladder and advance, and we feel like the technology is pulling those rungs from under us. And so the further we've gone up the ladder, the better we feel about our careers and the more stability we have. But the lower we are on that ladder, those rungs getting pulled under our feet. And so it makes lots of sense that we wouldn't recommend being on that ladder to anyone else because the rungs are disappearing. [00:38:12] S1: Man, there's so much to talk about with all this, but let me point out a couple things as I look at this and then we can move on to the next takeaway. One is just, it's interesting that sales and PM are the least bad at don't get into this role. That's interesting. I wouldn't have expected that. Salespeople not as scared about the future of their role. PM. Interesting. That's a big audience here. Not as scared. As you said, research, design, the most don't do this. As a researcher, you touched on this a little bit, but I'm just curious, how does it feel seeing this result?