Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm even more excited. Something that I'm very excited to get your take on. I don't know if you've watched me doing this, but I've been doing this sentiment survey of the tech workforce over the past couple of years. I think it's the biggest survey of its kind. We basically survey people in tech about how they're feeling about their careers, their work, their roles, especially with the rise of AI this last year. And kind of surprisingly, designers and user researchers are just the most unhappy on every dimension, every actual dimension. They're the most overwhelmed, the most anxious, the least optimistic, the most worried, the most tired, also the least likely to recommend their role to people entering the workforce. I'm curious if you are seeing this yourself in the design community. And if you are, what do you think is going on? 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.…

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