OpenAI’s chief economist: Copying successful people’s careers is bad advice
OpenAI’s chief economist has a clear message for workers navigating today’s rapidly shifting job market: stop trying to replicate the careers of high achievers.
Ronnie Chatterji, who is also a professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, said conventional career advice often urges people to study the résumés of successful figures and retrace their steps. He called this “relatively bad advice.”
“People often say something like ‘success leaves clues,’ meaning you should follow the paths of other successful people,” Chatterji said in an interview on the *Summation* podcast released Tuesday. Yet a successful person’s career is rarely a useful blueprint. Public CVs typically omit periods of struggle, uncertainty, and failure, and the choices that worked for them were shaped by a specific economic moment.
“The path that they took whenever they took it [was] very context dependent,” Chatterji said. “Very rare to find someone self-aware enough to say, you know, the way I did it won’t work for you anymore. It won’t work for anybody.”
While Chatterji did not name individuals, the trajectories of many Silicon Valley leaders coincided with era-defining technological shifts. Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook as expanding internet access helped social networking go mainstream. Jeff Bezos founded Amazon as e-commerce took off. Sam Altman has led OpenAI through the generative AI boom, enabled in part by increasingly powerful chips.
“The economic environment matters; it determines when the best time to found a company is, for example,” Chatterji said. “Those things depend on the dynamism of the economy.”
Skills that endure in the age of AI
The advice comes as artificial intelligence forces workers to rethink which jobs and skills will retain value. Chatterji said coding, mathematics, formal reasoning, and an understanding of how AI works will remain important. He also emphasized that judgment, flexibility, resilience, and the ability to identify worthwhile problems will grow more valuable as AI assumes more routine tasks.
His view aligns with a broader consensus among tech leaders and AI practitioners. Phil Chen, a former OpenAI researcher who also worked at Google DeepMind and Scale AI, recently argued that “problem selection and resource allocation” will be among the most critical skills as AI handles increasingly complex, well-defined work. Former Google executive Mo Gawdat has urged job seekers to master AI tools while focusing on human-centric roles. OpenAI president Greg Brockman has described “taste”—knowing what to keep—as a new core skill. And Prashanthi Padmanabhan, LinkedIn’s vice president of engineering for Talent Solutions, has highlighted critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, and teamwork as essential complements to technical ability.
Rather than modeling their paths on a founder, executive, or investor, workers should concentrate on the problems they want to solve and position themselves where those problems are being addressed, Chatterji said.
“We should use our heroes, our career heroes, our occupational heroes for inspiration but not step-by-step advice,” he said. “Success leaves clues, but it’s not in the step-by-step. It’s often in the habits.”