Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah. And it's interesting, you've had several guests on in the past who've talked about things related to this. I loved your conversation with Jeff from Ramp, and he shared that his worst burnout happened when velocity was lowest. So when you put effort into things that don't actually move, it doesn't feel good and that leads to burnout. And I think that maps for me with certain theories around burnout, where stagnation leads to burnout. I think what's going on now, is the opposite. These data showcase to you that as we ship faster than ever, as we move from shipping a couple of PRs a day to 30 PRs a day, or just doing so much more, in some ways that might be fun, but we are burning out more than we did before. And we're not working any less hard, clearly. We're just taking on more stuff, more stuff, more prototypes, more PRDs, more PRs, more campaigns, more agents, more ads, and it's leading to more burnout. Yeah. And that's actually one of the takeaways which we'll get to. I don't know if you have this in this deck, but a glimmer of hope that you pointed out is that enjoyment of work is actually still very high, that it's burnout, but also people still at the same levels last year actually, really enjoying their work. I think what we heard about enjoyment more than anything else, which does give me hope is, it's a couple of things I think. First of all, people are able to bring out certain aspects of their identity and of their passions that they weren't able to before. If you are currently a PM by role, but you have a designer within you, or you are a marketer, but really inside you have that engineer that's been really wanting to come out, now you can. Various tools that are available to us these days enable you to bring out those sides of your personality and those professional aspirations. And that's something that people are really enjoying. We're sort of escaping our classic swim lanes, and a certain percentage of our roles are transforming into something else. And then the second thing that people are saying that they're finding enjoyable is that they are able to manifest things that they've wanted to build, that seemed impossible not very long ago. And that's whether it's in their main job or things that they're doing on the site, et cetera. So it is still, for many people in tech, an exciting time and an enjoyable time, because we can do things that we never though we'd be able to do because they're outside of our role, because they're outside of what felt technically feasible, or for other reasons.…

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