The grief, loneliness, and burnout sweeping through the tech industry right now | Molly Graham

Lenny Rachitsky (0:00)

So we've been chatting about your famous Giveaway Your Legos Career Advice. This idea of how this advice applies in today's very strange AI world.

Molly Graham (0:09)

The narrative right now is literally like, okay, we hired this new employee. This new employee is the smartest employee that you have ever met. I want you to pour every single thing that you know into this employee, and then they're gonna take your job in six months. Like, who the f*** wants to do that?

Lenny Rachitsky (0:26)

Here's the big question, Molly. Are there any Legos you should not give away?

Molly Graham (0:29)

In AI land, I think we gotta caveat this. There are some Legos that shouldn't be given away. There's just some work that shouldn't be outsourced.

Lenny Rachitsky (0:37)

There's a radical departure from your advice over the many years.

Molly Graham (0:40)

You individually are phenomenal at a set of things. Don't outsource it to these weird robots that, you know, are effectively summer interns.

Lenny Rachitsky (0:48)

AI is taking a lot of our Legos, whether we like it or not. We're being encouraged to give our Legos to AI.

Molly Graham (0:53)

You had someone on who talked about, like, the job used to be rowing and now it's steering. And I was like, I feel like there's a lot of people out in the world right now that are like, I don't want to f***ing steer.

Lenny Rachitsky (1:03)

I've heard from a lot of engineers just like, I really miss what it used to be.

Molly Graham (1:06)

Change sucks. It also can be awesome, but we don't have to be fluffy bunnies about this. We can also just say, this is hard.

Lenny Rachitsky (1:13)

This is almost a discussion around what should AI do? Where do you want AI to be involved and where you not want it involved?

Molly Graham (1:19)

What would you do if you believed your job was always going to exist? It was just gonna look completely different every six years.

Lenny Rachitsky (1:29)

Today, my guest is Molly Graham. This is Molly's second visit to the podcast, and man, this is a powerful conversation. The frame for this conversation is her classic give away your Legos career advice. But in an AI world, Molly's advice for the last 13 years has been that your career will be better off if you give away your projects and your teams and your responsibilities to other people as your company grows, versus trying to hold on to it, which is what we naturally want to do. Essentially, to give away your Legos. After 13 years of giving this advice and it unlocking so much win for so many people over the past decade, Molly's realized that it is no longer true when you are giving away your Legos to AI. It's a lot more nuanced and complicated now. And so in this conversation, we try to get to the bottom of this question. What Legos should you still be giving away? And what Legos should you keep?

If you're not familiar with Molly, she has spent 20 plus years helping organizations and the humans inside them navigate growth and change. She's held leadership roles at Google and Facebook and Quip and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. These days, she hosts Ted's WorkLife Podcast, which she took over from Adam Grant. She also runs an incredibly important leadership community called Glue Club and writes a newsletter called Lessons.

Now, before we get into it, I noticed a lot of people don't finish our full episodes and miss some of the best stuff. So, to help you, we've just created a new Lenny's Most Replayed Moments YouTube channel that has exactly this, the most rewatched and shared segments from our long-form episodes. You can now check it out and subscribe to the channel at lennyspodcast.com/mostreplayedmoments.

There's also a link in the description. Finally, don't forget to check out lennysproductpast.com for a free year of the hottest and most beautifully crafted AI and non-AI products in the world. That's lennysproductpast.com. With that, I bring you Molly Graham.

Molly, thank you so much for being here. Welcome back to the podcast.

Molly Graham (3:38)

Thanks for having me, Lenny. I'm excited to be back.

Lenny Rachitsky (3:41)

I'm even more excited to have you back. Let me add a little context to this slightly unusual conversation we're gonna have.

We've been chatting over the past couple of months about your famous, infamous give away your Legos career advice.

This question came up, and I know you're hearing this a lot from other people, this idea of how this advice applies in today's very strange AI world, where AI is taking a lot of our Legos, whether we like it or not.