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

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

Molly Graham returns to Lenny's Podcast to examine how her famous 'give away your Legos' career advice must be revised for the AI era. She explores the widespread grief,

Key takeaways

• Graham reveals her 'give away your Legos' advice, published 13 years ago at First Round Review, now requires a major caveat: some work shouldn't be outsourced to AI because it lacks human judgment and accountability.
• Lenny's survey data shows tech burnout jumped from 44% in 2025 to 55% this year, correlating strongly with exhaustion from overseeing AI agents rather than collaborating with humans.

Main topics

• Evolution of the 'give away your Legos' career advice
• AI delegation vs. human collaboration and oversight

Notable quotes

"Change sucks. It also can be awesome. But we don't have to be fluffy bunnies about this."

Conclusion

Listeners gain a grounded framework for navigating AI-driven workplace cha

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (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. The Speaker 1 (0:09) 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 going to take your job in six months. Like, who the f***? wants to do that. Here's Speaker 2 (0:26) the big question, Molly. Are there any Legos you should not give away? Speaker 1 (0:29) In AI land. I think we got to caveat this. There are some Legos that shouldn't be Speaker 2 (0:34) given Speaker 1 (0:35) away. There's just some work that shouldn't be outsourced. Speaker 2 (0:37) Which Speaker 1 (0:37) is Speaker 2 (0:37) a radical departure from your advice over the many years. You Speaker 1 (0:40) individually are phenomenal at a set of things. Don't outsource it to these weird robots that, you know, are effectively summer interns. Speaker 2 (0:47) AI is taking a lot of our Legos, whether we like it or not. We're being encouraged to give away our Legos to AI. You Speaker 1 (0:53) 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 steer. Speaker 2 (1:03) I've heard from a lot of engineers just like I really miss what it used to be. Speaker 1 (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. Speaker 2 (1:13) This is almost a discussion around what should AI do? Where do you want AI to be involved in where you not want it involved? What Speaker 1 (1:19) would you do if you believed your job was always going to exist? It was just going to look completely different. Every six years. Speaker 2 (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 wind for so many people over the past decade, Molly has 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 Work Life 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 slash most replayed moments. There's also a link in the description. Finally, don't forget to check out lennysproductfast.com for a free year of the hottest and most beautifully crafted AI. and non-AI products in the world. That's lenny'sproductbass.com. With that, I bring you Molly Graham. Speaker 1 (3:34) Molly, Speaker 2 (3:34) thank you so much for being here. And welcome back to the podcast. Speaker 1 (3:38) Thanks for having me, Lenny. I'm excited to be back. Speaker 2 (3:41) I'm even more excited to have you back. Let me add a little context to this slightly unusual conversation we're going to have. So we've been chatting over the past couple months about your famous, infamous giveaway, your Legos career advice. And 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. And we're being encouraged to give our Legos to AI. People are afraid about AI taking their Legos. And so the question is just how this advice now applies in a world of AI. And I know this is kind of an ongoing thought process for you. But you actually have a lot of really interesting insights and takes on how to think about this advice now in today's very strange world. And so we're going to have a conversation about it, see where it goes. This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, skim, RBAC, audit logs, and other features required by large companies. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand upmarket ends up working with WorkOS. And that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seed stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally. WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise-ready and unblocking growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit WorkOS.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to WorkOS.com to make your Speaker 1 (5:42) app enterprise-ready today. Speaker 2 (5:44) I'd say as a first step, let's remind people what this advice is. I imagine most people have heard it. A lot of people are probably like, oh, yeah, I kind of get the idea. So explain the kind of the original idea of giving away your Legos. It Speaker 1 (5:56) actually started when I was at Google and Facebook, and it started as a little talk that I would give people that worked for me. And for context, like Google was pretty big when I joined. It was like 10,000 employees in 2007. But my department grew from 25 people to 125 people in nine months. So that was my first experience with like really rapid scale. And then I went to Facebook and Facebook was relatively small when I joined. It was 500 employees and 80 million users, smaller than MySpace, which is always good context to remember. And, you know, while I was there, you know, obviously a huge growth curve. I left five years later. It was 5,500 employees and over a billion users. So that. experience was nuts from a scaling perspective. And what I witnessed at Google and then sort of really witnessed at Facebook was how hard and scary that experience was for people. I watched a lot of folks. go from sort of like you build a thing, right? You show up and you become the person that owns the blog or owns this part of the stack or built that product. And you sort of build like an identity around it. You're the this person, whatever that is. And then the nature of scale is that everything around you changes. And so somebody shows up and your manager shows up and says, hey, you need to, you know, hand that thing that you've built your whole identity around to someone else. And. you know, go on to doing something else. And your first instinct is like, what? You know, like, no, I don't I don't want to give it away. Like, I I'm good at this. I know how to do this. I also think it's fun. And what if it's the only fun thing to do? And so you kind of witness people like would have this tendency to hold on. And so what I started to do with people on my team was say, hey, this change is happening. And here's how you might feel, right, that you might feel like all these feelings, territorial and wanting to hold on. And actually, the most important thing to do is to give things away, to evolve as the company is evolving. brain is a really weird place. Like I grew up on the Muppets. So I just like spits out. I always think there's just like a lot of tiny monsters dancing around singing songs in my head. But like that is why metaphors come out for me. And so I always use this metaphor of like just a bunch of kindergartners and like somebody dumps a pile of Legos in front of you. And at first it's fun, a little overwhelming. Then you start building. And and the giveaway or Legos part is like that feeling when somebody else shows up and they try to take the tower out of your hands. And the kindergartner response is like, get out of here. You know what I mean? It's like shoving someone away when actually like you get multiple people. It means, oh, you can go build something new and fun. You can start from scratch and you can learn something. But the natural human instinct in the face of change is to hold on to things and to resist the change, right, to to be territorial and all of those things. So anyway, I started giving this talk. to folks on my team to kind of help them understand that change and what was coming. And then eventually I sent it out to my friends at First Round who were building the First Round review at the time. And just to be clear, this is now 13 years ago. The talk I was like when when I was at Facebook, it was over 20 years ago. And it I sent it to First Round and we published it. And, you know, I would have said. I was speaking to folks going through a Facebook-like experience. Like I would have said like, hey, this is an article that is for like the Stripes or the Slacks or whoever was, you know, blowing up in 2013. To normalize, hey, this is what it feels like. And this is what you have to do to grow as fast as your company is growing. But what happened when it was published is that I got emails from all over the world. I got... emails from people at companies like Safeway, you know, where, and this woman, I still remember this email wrote me and was like, this was so helpful to me. This like perfectly describes what I've been going through on my team. And I got an email again, I remember it very vividly from a founder in Nigeria who was like, my team went from two people to four people this year and giveaway or Legos like is so valuable to me. Like this is exactly what I've been feeling. And my first reaction was like, I didn't. write this for you. Like this is not this was not meant for you. But my second one was, whoa, this is about something much bigger than just what it feels like to be inside of rapid scale. And fundamentally, I think the Legos message is about change, you know, and it's about the fact that when you go through change, a lot of shit happens to you. You know what I mean? Like it just. is a very specific experience. And I think that's why it ended up being so universal. And it is crazy. Like I still get emails about it, multiple emails a month about it to this day. So it's lasted in a way that again, like I just thought I was sending out a note to the folks that are going through crazy rapid change. Speaker 2 (11:11) I was at a first round event. I don't know, here or somewhere. And they were talking about all the different posts people have written. And I think it's one of the, maybe the... first or second most popular post on the first round review. Speaker 1 (11:21) It's up there and it's traveled in ways that I don't think any of us imagined it would. Speaker 2 (11:27) Okay, so let's talk about what still holds true in this advice in this today's very strange AI world. What still holds true? What's still correct about this advice based on what you're seeing? Speaker 1 (11:39) One thing that's crazy about this article is I still get so many emails about it today. I still get asked to give speeches, you know, at every fast growing company. So I think for anybody that's going through rapid scale, Legos is still really relevant. But the interesting thing is like what started to happen, it's probably like two years ago, is I got more inbound from managers and more inbound from leaders about Legos. Just more people grappling with change inside their companies. And I think that is... the thing that really holds true today and actually has just become more universal. You know, I used to really check before I went and did a speech at some company how fast the company was growing. I would ask like kind of about revenue growth and about headcount growth, because that just helps me contextualize like how I should speak to employees. And I still do that. But it's also become really clear that every single company in the world is going through enormous change of varying shapes and kinds right now. And that is the fundamental underlying message of Legos is how do you deal with change and how do you be your best self in the face of change? So I feel like the number one thing that is. true today, as true as it was, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, is the change is really scary and hard. And I always say, like, somebody once asked me to, like, summarize the Legos article in one sentence. They're like, Molly, this is too long. Like, give me the cliff notes. And I said two things. Unfortunately, they didn't get one sentence. They got two. The two sentences were. Speaker 1 (13:29) Number one, your main job in the face of rapid growth and change is to make yourself irrelevant. Because it is the only way that you can be prepared for whatever is coming next. And the second piece of advice or a sort of second summary of it was don't worry, it's all going to be OK. I always feel like the Legos article and the speeches I give are like a form of group therapy. They're like just a giant hug. Like, yes, it feels chaotic and overwhelming and stressful, but there's all this opportunity on the other side. And I think that the don't worry, it's all going to be OK is really something everybody needs to hear that like change is scary and hard, but it doesn't necessarily mean the world is ending. I think. This the second piece of that is that change comes with this incredible set of emotions like this wild roller coaster that we don't talk about enough. And I think that was a lot of why I first started talking about Legos like at Facebook and on my teams was I just wanted to normalize for people what it felt like that that you might feel all these feelings and that that was what. everyone around you was feeling, right? That it didn't make you crazy and it didn't make you broken or something like that. It also didn't mean anything was wrong. It actually meant that all the right things were happening. And I think that is very real today. Like when I travel around and I'm talking to leaders, and I know you and I are going to talk about this, but a lot of what I'm hearing is grief and all these different emotions. There's obviously like excitement and joy in this moment of chaos and change with AI. But there is a lot of sadness. There's a lot of overwhelm that all, you know, manifests, some of it manifests in burnout. But it's like, there is just a lot going on for people right now. And you really can't lead right now without talking about that and without normalizing that. And I think that's like. Such a big part of the giveaway or Legos, you know, today is just like. helping people understand that these emotions are just part of sort of your body and your identity reacting to change. The other two things I would say that really do still feel true to me that I both talked about in the article and have talked about a lot since is. Speaker 1 (15:46) Like one of the things I say to people that are inside of a really rapidly growing company is the future will be defined by the people that learn, not the people that know. You know, I always say like what you can learn by tomorrow matters way more than what you know today. And like never has a truer sentence been said than like about the age of AI. Do you know what I mean? Like whatever we thought we knew six months ago, like toss it out the window. Something new is true today. But what I used to say to people, and I still say, I guess when I do these speeches is like. You go look at that graph of how fast your company is growing, right? You go look at like that curve, you know, and at Facebook, it was like, felt like we were falling off of it. That is the graph of how fast your company is growing. Yes. But it is also the graph of how fast your job is growing, right? How fast every single thing around you is growing and changing, which means it's also the graph of how fast you need to grow. I think that is such an important thing to understand inside of a world of change, which is that standing still, right, it feels safe. It feels like. hold on to what you know, you know, because that that at least it's not, you know, scary and unknown. But actually standing still is like. the least safe thing you can do. It's basically you're guaranteed to fall behind. And I saw this viscerally at Facebook when, because the first two years I was in HR and you could literally see like the highest performer one year if they didn't grow and change. And if they didn't evolve their team fast enough, they were underwater like less than a year later because it was a different company. And I think this is happening with AI as well. which is that we do have these instincts to like hold on to what we know and to defend what we know and to fight for what we know for a bunch of different reasons, many of them good. But the future is going to be defined by the people that are willing to just take the stance of learning and to throw themselves into this change, scary and unknown as it is. And that message, again, remains true in this wild, wild world. Speaker 2 (17:58) Before we get into just what to have the advice is different, which when you go back to your summary of the two kind of items that kind of summarize the idea, one is become redundant. And then two, what was the second sentence? The second Speaker 1 (18:10) one is basically, don't worry, it's all going to be okay. Don't Speaker 2 (18:12) worry. Speaker 1 (18:12) Yeah. Speaker 2 (18:12) Okay. So those don't feel necessarily correct anymore. So we're going to get into that because I think that's, as you said, the core of people's concern. That was like comforting. And now it's like, well, are you sure? Speaker 1 (18:24) Yeah. Speaker 2 (18:26) This grief piece, just to spend a little more time here, I've been seeing this a lot in a lot of different professions. I've done these surveys that we might get into a little bit. But just engineering as a role has completely transformed in two years. It's been like the same job forever, writing code, sitting there writing code in various forms of IDEs, no longer part of the job. Now it's talking to your AI to write the code. Whether you're there or not, that's where it's all going. It's going to be 100 % write this thing, build this thing. And I used to be an engineer and I moved into product. And I was so missing that flow state of being an engineer, just sitting there coding, building. And now that's gone. you no longer sit there and just build a thing. You're just like waiting for agents to run and then checking. You probably have a hundred different agents. It's just like a very strange new job. And I've heard from a lot of engineers just like I really miss what it used to be. Speaker 1 (19:21) Yeah. Speaker 2 (19:22) Anything more there about just I don't know what you're hearing from folks about just like, man, this sucks. Speaker 1 (19:27) No, it's exactly. It's such a perfect example of like the grief. Speaker 1 (19:35) I was giving a speech like two weeks ago at a pretty fast-growing tech company. And this guy came up to me after. And he'd been at the company for a couple of years. So it's gone through like a huge amount of change. And he was talking to me about the fact that he just wasn't enjoying his role as much anymore. And my brain immediately went to, oh, right, like you enjoyed it when it was smaller and there was more creativity and now there's more structure. And so I was talking to him about that. And it took like... And to some extent, like I want to go talk to him again because I feel like I missed it in the first conversation where actually I think what he was talking about was the grief that is very present for him now in the fact that he's not sure what is his current job. Like, what is this? The company has grown. And so he's in a more structured environment. And what is just the simple fact that engineering has totally changed? And a lot of what he was talking about was how much he missed. being more hands-on, which is, you know, one way of saying it. But I think that that grief is happening for a lot of people. I think engineering is like probably one of the most visceral areas where people's jobs have genuinely transformed. Speaker 1 (20:47) You know, you had someone on last week who talked about like the job used to be rowing. Tara from Speaker 2 (20:55) OpenAI. Speaker 1 (20:56) She said like the job used to be rowing and now it's like steering. 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 fucking steer. Do you know what I mean? I want to row. Like I like rowing. Or I mean, and I think it can be hard to separate. I like rowing or I'm scared that rowing is the only thing I'm ever going to be good at, or it's what I know. And I don't know if I can be good at steering. And I think that's happening in a lot of disciplines, you know? And so that grief, like first and foremost, like that grief is really real. You know, I was talking to a product leader just the other day who was like, I don't know, man, we're like all supposed to be these like. you know, universal builders now. And she was like, it's kind of lonely. You know, she's like, I miss these parts of the collaboration that have been a little bit stripped away because now I'm working with robots all the time, you know? And I was like, I just said to her, like, yeah, man, that sucks. Let's sit with it for a second. You know, like 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. Speaker 2 (22:09) There's so much power in just like saying the thing that you're feeling. I Speaker 1 (22:14) swear to God that that is a big chunk of what the Legos article did. It was just like, this is hard and scary. And that's, and, and it's going to be okay. You know? Speaker 2 (22:25) This loneliness piece is such an important part to touch on. I had Fiona Fung on the podcast who leads Cloud Code, the engineering team of Cloud Code. She's Boris Journey's boss, fun fact. And she said this exact that they're like, I asked her just what's kind of the downside of this world. And it's engineers are used to work with a bunch of engineers. Teams used to be, you know, five engineers, 10 engineers. And now it's fewer teams, fewer engineers per team. And it's just like, you're talking to Adrians all day. And so it's not the same. It's not the same. And Speaker 1 (22:59) I think that's actually something that leaders of companies that are actually like in charge of org structures and thinking about what the future of structure of teams, you know, needs to look like. You actually need to think about it because like, yeah, maybe you can like strip out all the humans and you get all this. productivity and maybe you get efficiency, but you also get sad humans. Speaker 2 (23:22) Do Speaker 1 (23:22) you know what I mean? And like that doesn't lead to like the best work for anyone. Like I thought your survey data around the fact that small teams and smaller companies are so much happier than people at the bigger companies was really interesting just because, A, that like very much resonates with what I see in all my conversations with leaders. But it also to me is a reflection of like. I think we're seeing more at these bigger companies where people are stripping out management layers and there's a lot more pressure on productivity and things like that. And there's less room for the human. You know, there's less room for the joy and the excitement when all you're doing is focusing on optimizing cost and robot efficiency, you know? Speaker 2 (24:06) Yeah, man, there's so much to talk about here. There's this really cool framework, I don't know, mental model that Cory Doctorow wrote about. a while ago where he talks about the centaur and the reverse centaur. You heard of this? Speaker