Former Openai Engineer description is what likes to work there

When Engineer and MIT Bachelor Calvin French-Owen In May 2024 joined Openai, there were about 1,000 employees in the startup. A year later, Openai’s workforce had tripled 3,000 employees, and was in the top 30% of the French-Owen term.

One in blog post Published on Tuesday, French-Owen widened that from May 2024 to June 2025, preferred to work for chatup-mekar for a year slightly more than a year. He left Openai three weeks ago, stating that there was no “personal drama” behind his decision, but he was just making a new beginning.

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While living in openi, French-Owen worked ZabtaA coding assistant Issued In May, which competes with AI coding tools such as cursor and anthropic Cloud codeHe described in his blog post that his team of eight engineers, four researchers, two designers, two Go-to-Market managers, and a project manager made Codex in just seven weeks. He worked mostly at 11 o’clock or by midnight and came to the office over the weekend to complete the project.

French-Owen wrote, “How incredible it was for pace that it was incredible of speed.” “I have not seen organizations in such a small window in such a small window,” I have not seen the available product fully launched to get bigger or smaller. “

He later said that Zabta The launch had reached 630,000 engineers in less than two months since the launch.

“I am not sure I have ever done such an impressive job in my life,” French-Owen wrote.

^{Calvin French-Owen. Photo by Harry Murphy/Sportsfile for web summit through getty image}

An “unusual” aspect of Openai, which French-Owen insisted in his blog post, was “there is no email,” and almost all communication work is on the workplace messaging platform slack. He speculated that he received about 10 emails in his entire time in the company.

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French-Owen also said that Openi has a strong bias for action, meaning that employees are encouraged to have good views and work on them. He portrayed the startup as extremely meritocratic, promoting employees based on their ability, which are based on the best ideas rather than their ability to present in meetings or play political games.

French-Owen found Openai as “a very secret place” as well as “more serious place than you expect”. The startup stopped him from telling someone from telling someone what he was doing in detail, and it felt as if the company had more bets to manufacture products used by 500 million global weekly users.

French-Owen also wrote that when it comes to engineering personnel, there is a “very important” meta for the OpenaiI pipeline. He said that OpenaiI is similar to Meta in its early days, with a top performing consumer app and “really a desire to move forward quickly”.

Before joining Openai, French-Owen was the co-founder of the first data startup segment, which was bought by Twilio $ 3.2 billion In 2020.

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Meta is also hiring talent from Openai. Meta recently Pooched Top Openai researchers, including Chatgpt’s co-producer Shengjia Zhao and Chatgpt Voice Mode co-producer Shuchao Bi, allegedly with a payment package in nine figures. Openai Chief Research Officer Mark Chen indicated last month Leak Slack Message The company is rethinking compensation in response to the poaching.

Openai raised $ 40 billion in March at an evaluation of $ 300 billion, Largest private technical deal Ever recorded.

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