Dylan Field: belief

Transcript context

…Oh, I love that. I've been using the word product builder a lot more actually too. It just feels like such a better term instead of product manager or engineer. There's this question of, which function will be most taken on by other functions? For example, do you think engineers and PMs will become, engineers and designers will become more PM-y, PMs will become more design-y? Which function maybe is most in trouble, is one way to put it. I think that it all depends on the way that things play out from here. Of course, no one knows if we're on S-curve of progress or an exponential curve, or actually we're on that end of the S-curve, but it's about to become exponential because of a new architecture breakthrough. I think the only thing that we know is that models will improve. Will it be incremental? Will it be exponential? Somewhere in between, who knows? But what you have to believe is that you get better as models get better. Your organization gets better as models get better. Right now at least we're nowhere near, at least at Figma, to the point where our demand for development for example is satiated. Have we seen productivity increases? Yeah, mild to moderate, but that is not something that has made our new headcount we want for engineering to go down. We're hiring, and on the product side, yeah, judgment matters just as much as ever. The ability to rally a team around a vision matters just as much as ever. Design I think grows only more important in this role, in this world. I think in this world where software can be created more easily, design matters so much and designers matter so much. I think designers are going to be the leaders of the future and I think that more designers need to step into that leadership role. More PMs and developers and researchers also need to be willing to engage with design as well. Because I think at the end of the day, that's going to be how you win or lose, and if you don't internalize that now you're going to regret it later. On the point about job displacement, there's someone who's just tweeting, OpenAI released this whole evals, GDP eval, which measures progress of AI towards replacing actual jobs. Like an eval of a bunch of 40 different actual jobs, and a few of them were like, the AI is a few percentage points away from humans, it turns out. Interestingly, those jobs are not yet disappearing, which tells us there's hope that this may actually not destroy a ton of jobs, maybe it gets to a hundred percent and then we're screwed, but it doesn't seem like it.…

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