Lenny Rachitsky: recommendation

Transcript context

…Yeah. Yeah. We have this framework called players, coaches, captains, and we talk about a little bit of the differences. And it helps distinguish the different type of leadership between senior IC and a manager. A manager is more of a coach, they're kind of coaching from the sidelines. And IC is like leading from being on the playing field. And those two things are very different. We kind of put that in place. We changed our entire compensation structure so that there is zero compensation trade off, whether you just want to keep growing as IC and stuff. There's more of these captain roles internally than there are manager roles internally. We've created the same titles for all of the levels, so people don't feel like they're making a trade-off on that external signaling factor. We give all the strategic problems to the captain level IC roles. The managers and coaches are purely around hiring, coaching, positioning players on the field. Identifying problems, but then handing those problems off for others to go solve. All of these types of things. But one of those things that's really bothered me for a long time is that you end up on this manager death cycle. When people think that's the only way that they can progress or the only way that they don't have to make these trade-offs, you end up with a lot of folks in those roles who are neither good at them or don't really want to do at them. And oh, by the way, you've also taken your star IC players off the field in the process of all of that. And then they go and just repeat the cycle. They create meetings and processes and all those things because what managers are supposed to do. And then they coach their team as that's the way you progress in this org. The whole thing repeats itself and it ends up being a really big mess. And so I think a lot of these principles are not new, especially in software engineering. I think that's where they've been around the longest. But we've applied it to every single function within the organization. And I think we'll take further steps in the future to even compensate the captain IC roles higher than the managers to essentially really provide a counteracting force. And people have to make a negative trade-off to become a manager, to make sure that people who end up in those roles are the ones who truly want to be there and truly do that type of work. And be the problem catcher, that type of work as part of it. I feel like this also just a very common theme now across companies. I feel like if you haven't written about this, I think just sharing this in depth would be really useful to a lot of people. Because I think a lot of startups are trying to think about this. I think a lot of folks have really come to this realization through some of these hard times where a lot of pressure gets put on prioritization and budget cuts and stuff. I would go as far to say as I think this is where the world is headed. All of this AI tooling is going to give these super ICs, these captain level ICs even more leverage in solving problems and their creation abilities as part of that. And so I think in the future, what we're going to see ... and I'm not the first one to say this, there have been others like Scott Belsky and others that have written about this. Which is just, I think the future is actually companies that are ... they're much smaller teams where all of these AI tools are giving one person a wider set of creation abilities. And as a result, you don't need as many people to solve the same size problem as you want to. And that's great. There's less coordination, there's less all of the things that people end up hating their jobs over. Whether that's writing updates and reviews and all of that type of stuff. I think it's a very positive thing and as a result, we're going to see happier people, happier companies, and more creative output as part of it. And so I don't know. I think the future favors these super IC types over the manager types.…

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