Jenny Wen: belief

Transcript context

…If someone's a young designer trying to break in, trying to be successful, what would your advice be to them to help them have a shot at joining Anthropic, for example? I would just say just build a bunch of stuff, try a bunch of stuff out, build actual things. I think that can feel ... I don't really know what the state of design education or education is these days, but at least from back when I was in school, everything was very theoretical, and here, we're going to teach you some approaches and whatnot. But the best crack new grad folks I know are just people who just use the technology, build actual things, don't feel limited by how little experience they might have. I think that sometimes they're actually unburdened by that, because we have expectations of ourselves after being in the industry for so long, but they actually don't and they sort of feel like anything is possible. And so just building a bunch of stuff and sharing it with people, and finding a community of folks that also do that. Yeah. I think my one call it here too, is I went to a school that started something called Socratica a few years after, actually a while after I graduated. And basically their whole thing is building stuff and showcasing it almost like a science project. And I think there's just been a really cool movement there of folks who just build things and do things. For example, somebody built this Claude robot project, this was a few years ago too, where they were just assembling robots that were running on Claude, and then somebody else did something where she just wanted to put Googly eyes on a bus in Boston or something. And there's just a sense of both agency in terms of, yeah, we can just do stuff, but then also this community where people were just trying and building things and sharing things with each other. So whatever that looks like, given the school that someone's from or graduating from, doing that kind of stuff is the stuff that will make people stand out. For current designers that are [inaudible 00:52:54] career, [inaudible 00:52:55] senior, do you think that you need to get technical and learn to code, at least build, or do you think you could be really successful and just not lean into that and get better at other stuff?…

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