OpenAI researcher says early-career tech workers should treat jobs as test drives

• An OpenAI researcher wrote an X thread defending “job-hopping.”
• He said it could help early-career engineers find a fit and know their value before committing to a company.
• Still, it’s a tough time to job-hop, especially in the tech sector, recent data suggests.

A tough job market raised the stakes for young workers

But Petersson said some of the best engineers he knows spent years at early jobs that, in hindsight, were not valuable stepping stones. He gave the example of an engineer spending “2.5 years at a startup” after college, making $80,000, before later landing a multimillion-dollar deal.

He said that some workers do strike it rich by joining the right company early. He wrote that a small number of people end up at a frontier AI lab or as early engineers at fast-growing startups, making life-changing money.

“These are extremely rare,” he wrote. “Ask any great engineer and you’ll realize how many years they wasted with bad companies.”

Petersson and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.