Ian Silber: prediction

Transcript context

…First of all, it's an incredible survey and it's such great, I think, information to have as an industry. And I think it's something we need to unpack. And I see a mix for sure. I think I can speak most to design. And I mean, I talk to a lot of designers that are very optimistic and very excited. And so in my world, luckily, I see a lot of that, but I can totally understand why people might be feeling very uncertain. Because there's so much discussion about, well, is the role changing? Should my expectations be different? And well, do I need to do X, Y, and Z? Do I need to be shipping code every day? And someone who might be sort of classically trained in a certain way of working now feeling like, "Oh my gosh, I need to really change everything." And I think to me right now, it feels like the uncertainty of that, I can totally understand. Because as an engineer, I think people, they've already sort of gone through that shift. We see that engineers are working totally different. One thing I do hear, and this came up a lot in my own team when we do similar surveys internally. One of the big things that came up was we see that engineers have 10 or sometimes 100X their productivity, but our design team hasn't because the design process still takes time. It's still, sometimes you have to try a bunch of things and throw them out versus maybe working with a coding agent, you ask it to do something that's pretty binary. Now at this point, it usually sort of gets it pretty well. But the design process is really still very messy and fluid and you think you have a great idea and you try it and it sucks. And then you try it again and it sucks and you give it to users or you get internal feedback and it's wrong. And you still have to go through that arduous and kind of messy but really fun process. And that hasn't really... It's compressed in that you can get much more ideas out fast, but you still need that whole sort of feedback loop. There's the alignment of getting many people, especially in a bigger company, that still has a lot of overhead. So the point is that I think that we're unclear right now what is expected of a designer and that lack of clarity I can see totally lead to some fears or some unease, I guess. But on the other hand, I've seen that, I mean our designers, what's great I think at OpenAI is we're such an experimental company. We are driven by research and we treat our company as a research lab and we totally embrace that. And that's a new thing that I really learned and have really come to love about OpenAI is that started as a research lab, that DNA is deeply embedded in everything we do. And as designers, I think that you come here, we look for people that don't have a background in AI, but are really curious about the tools and how it can work. And we found that just by supporting that excitement to explore, that people feel less pressure. It's not like you need to change the way you work, but it's more about encouraging exploration. n work. And we found that just by supporting that excitement to explore, that people feel less pressure. It's not like you need to change the way you work, but it's more about encouraging exploration. And when we've done that, when I go and talk to both very senior designers and early career designers at our company, they're so excited because they... I literally was just asking some people before this because I wanted to get some different takes. And I think the feeling is that they have so much more ability to be creative, to express themselves, to try bad ideas and throw them out. They can just really move through lots of different ideas and it becomes this incredible way to create. And the things that I'm seeing from my team, the bar is raising. I think the thinking is getting stronger the more that they're using these tools. So I think for the people that are starting to embrace this, they're starting to feel really excited and realizing that they have just so much agency as designers and so much more ability to have really high impact as a designer. This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, SCIM, RBAC, audit logs, and other features required by large companies. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand upmarket ends up working with WorkOS, and that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seed stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unblocking growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise ready today. What I'd love to do in this conversation is help folks that are in that bucket of, "This sucks and things aren't going well." Because as you said, and this is exactly what we found in that survey, is about half of people are having the best time of their career, having the most fun, the most optimistic about where things are going, and then the half are not, having a really hard time. And exactly what you said, the people that are having a great time report, the strongest correlation is they feel amplified by AI. It's actually making them better. And that's the way you described engineers, they're seeing that now. They're like, "Holy, I can do so much more." And so just to kind of reinforce the points you're making, attributes of people that are doing well feel amplified, very curious, have time to explore, feel like they can be more creative. Is there any more thing more along those lines of just patterns of people that are doing really well and having a great time that might be helpful for people to hear that are not having a good time?…

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