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OpenAI famously used to hire strong generalists over specialists (save for research positions). They don't do that so much anymore but I'm convinced it was inst
by sackfield 3y ago
OpenAI famously used to hire strong generalists over specialists (save for research positions). They don't do that so much anymore but I'm convinced it was instrumental in building such a good team there, strong generalists can generally fit to a new problem space much quicker than specialist, which probably helped them ramp up their tech quickly. As a generalist, it was refreshing to see this, you could just be who you were rather than going undercover.
- mp05 3y agoIt's a sound strategy as I expect "specialists" have a tendency to get caught up in minutia that aren't pertinent to the problem at hand. I would imagine that these "generalists" in software/development had some other "specialty" though; perhaps degrees in various sciences/engineerings, quant, linguistics, music, or really anything that demonstrates that the person is up to some analytic rigor and capable of following through on a difficult series of tasks.