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.

Gabriel Petersson said he doesn’t think young workers need to avoid the dreaded “job-hopper” label.

In several X posts on Sunday, the OpenAI researcher said young tech workers should test out different teams before anchoring themselves to one company.

His view: early-career engineers need data points — on research projects, culture, and their own market value — before making a long-term bet. He called the traditional stay-put advice “braindead.”

“Please don’t take the advice that you should stay at a company long and ‘not hop around’ for your first jobs,” he wrote.

Recruiters have traditionally warned against job-hopping — or, relocating to new positions and companies every one to three years — because it can call a worker’s commitment into question.

Petersson said he doesn’t agree with that advice, suggesting that other young engineers instead take a fast approach to building their careers.

“Just tell people you are looking for internship or you want to ‘try working together for a month’ or say you’re a contractor,” he wrote, saying that hopping can result in “huge wins for everyone that all sides have information so you can price yourself in.”

Petersson himself hopped around before landing an AI research position at OpenAI in 2024, when he was 23, according to his GitHub profile. Before that, he worked as a software engineer at Dataland and Midourney for less than two years each, according to his LinkedIn profile. He dropped out of high school in Sweden at 17 to focus on building AI start-ups.

He isn’t the only tech personality to make the case for job-hopping. In April, when asked to grade some common career advice, Ryan Roslansky, LinkedIn’s former CEO, gave job-hopping for more money an “A.”

A tough job market raised the stakes for young workers

Still, the suggestions land at a tough moment for young workers, especially in tech. Tech companies, including Meta, Oracle, Microsoft, and Block, have announced major layoffs in recent months. Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a layoff-tracking firm, said that while fewer employers are cutting jobs overall this year, layoffs in the tech sector are up 40%.

Entry-level and engineering jobs have also been hit hard by AI, making the post-college job hunt harder for many young Americans — and raising the stakes for those who do land a role.

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.