OpenAI’s chief economist says copying successful people’s careers is bad advice

OpenAI's chief economist has some advice for workers navigating a rapidly changing job market: stop trying to replicate the careers of successful people.

Ronnie Chatterji, who is also a professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, said conventional career wisdom often encourages people to study high achievers' résumés and retrace their steps.

The OpenAI exec said this is "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 on Tuesday.

But a successful person's career is rarely a useful blueprint, he said, because their public CV often leaves out periods of struggle, uncertainty, and failure. The choices that worked for them were shaped by a specific economic moment, he said.

"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 didn't name anyone, the rise of some of Silicon Valley's most prominent leaders coincided with era-defining technological shifts.

Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook as growing internet access helped social networking go mainstream, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon as e-commerce took off, and 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."

The skills that endure in the age of AI

The advice lands as AI forces workers to reconsider which jobs and skills will remain valuable.

Chatterji said coding, maths, formal reasoning, and an understanding of how AI works will remain important. He also said judgment, flexibility, resilience, and the ability to identify worthwhile problems will become more valuable as AI takes on more tasks.

That puts him in line with a growing body of advice from tech leaders and AI workers over the past year.

Phil Chen, a former OpenAI researcher who also worked at Google DeepMind and Scale AI, said this month that "problem selection and resource allocation" will be the most important skills as AI handles more complex, well-defined work.

Former Google executive Mo Gawdat has urged job seekers to learn AI tools while leaning into human-centric work, while OpenAI president Greg Brockman has described "taste" — knowing what to keep — as a new core skill. Prashanthi Padmanabhan, LinkedIn's vice president of engineering for Talent Solutions, has also highlighted "critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, and teamwork" as skills workers need alongside technical ability.

Rather than modeling their lives on a founder, executive, investor, or other career hero, workers should focus on the problems they want to solve and try to position themselves where those problems are being tackled, Chatterji said.

"We should use our heroes, our career heroes, our occupational heroes for inspiration but not step-by-step advice," Chatterji said.

"Success leaves clues, but it's not in the step-by-step," Chatterji added. "It's often in the habits."