Business

Roblox CEO David Baszucki says the best career advice he’s ever received is to outright ignore the advice of others

Published

3 hours ago

December 19, 2025

As some Gen Z graduates find themselves iced out of the job market, millions have slipped into so-called NEET status (not in employment, education, or training), unclear as to when their careers will finally be able to take off. For Roblox CEO David Baszucki, that sense of professional drift is familiar.

Although today he helms the $60 billion video game platform—and has a $5 billion net worth to go with it—when he graduated from Stanford University in 1985, he said his career prospects were anything but clear.

Like today’s aspiring professionals, it was tempting for him to lean on the advice of mentors, professors, or friends to figure out how to jump-start his career. But Baszucki warns that mindset could leave you worse off. In fact, looking back, he says the best advice he ever received was to actually stop overvaluing what others think.

“A lot of my development has been trying to, over time, ignore advice I’ve been given,” Baszucki recalled to students at his alma mater. Instead, when you’re having a rough time, listen when people say, “Trust your gut.”

Baszucki went from lost window cleaner to billionaire tech leader

Even though Stanford has a reputation as a launchpad for billion-dollar companies—from Snapchat to Databricks—Baszucki hit a wall after graduation. His dream job didn’t materialize, and his résumé was thin: One of his only work experiences was window-cleaning with his brother one summer.

“I can remember in this terrible time right out of college trying to figure out what I was going to do,” Baszucki shared with an audience of Stanford business students.

“Rather than trusting my intuition, I can remember having a spreadsheet of nine potential careers and then all these metrics—‘it’s really good for this, but it’s not so good for this.’

“It was, like, a really weird way to try to figure out your career,” he added.

It was then that Baszucki first learned about the need to trust your own instincts.

After landing a postgrad salaried role, Baszucki spent the next two or three years in what he now calls the “absolute worst jobs in the world” where he faced “massive disappointment.”

Eventually, he took a step back to listen to his gut—and the reset paid off. Baszucki went on to carve his own path and create Knowledge Revolution, an educational software company that sold for $20 million in 1998. After the sale, he expected to get poached for a CEO job. When he didn’t, he found himself once again adrift and needing to forge his own path.

“Time and time again, you have to participate in making your own reality,” he told Fortune earlier this year.

A few years later, he began building what would become Roblox, now a global gaming platform with over 150 million daily active users.

Fortune reached out to Roblox for further comment.

The best career advice: Trust your own instincts

During a time when data and data-driven decision-making is all the rage in the workplace, leaning on intuition might sound misguided. However, many executives still lean on their instincts to guide even major business decisions.

“Be able to balance a lot of different people’s opinions, but at the end of the day, you have to have your own conviction deep down and make decisions for yourself,” LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky said when asked to give career advice.

“You have to know what’s right, you have to care about what’s right, to be passionate about what’s right,” Roslansky added. “And if you’re going to put yourself out there and decide to dive into the crowd, it should be because you want to … not because someone else is telling you to do it.”

Skims cofounder and CEO Jens Grede also recently echoed the importance of trusting your gut—as long as you exercise it.

“You can feed [intuition] by being a curious person,” Grede said on his wife Emma’s Aspire podcast. “Your gut is really your collective memory, your collective experience and learnings … Every book you read, every article, every conversation, every wrong or right decision you’ve made, that becomes your gut.”

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Business

Want a job in AI-era tech? Forget prestigious degrees—tech leaders want to see your GitHub projects and internships

Published

40 minutes ago

December 19, 2025

Jace Porter

For decades, computer science has been sold as one of the surest paths to economic security. And leaders across politics and industry—from former President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates—have at times urged students not to overlook the field, framing coding skills as the secret to stable, high-paying jobs.

But as artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes the workplace, that promise is starting to look less certain.

A new survey of more than 200 engineering leaders, conducted by tech training nonprofit CodePath and shared exclusively with Fortune, shows entry-level tech hiring is slowing. More than one-third of respondents, 38%, said their company has reduced the number of entry-level hiring over the past year, and nearly 1 in 7 reported pausing Gen Z hiring altogether.

At the same time, 18% said hiring had stayed the same, and 8% reported an increase. Despite the overall slowdown, CodePath CEO Michael Ellison—a Y Combinator alum—argues telling people to avoid tech right now would be a mistake.

“That’s just kind of like taking crazy pills if you end up choosing not to invest in the tools that make you the most powerful—of telling computers what you want them to do in an age where computers are becoming exponentially more powerful,” Ellison told Fortune. “So to me, it’s like saying, ‘don’t learn how to use the internet.’”

Ellison’s argument reflects a broader shift in how computer science fits into the AI economy. As generative AI tools become more capable, understanding how software works—and how to direct, customize, and integrate AI systems—is increasingly seen as a foundational skill rather than a specialized one.

That demand is already showing up in the labor market. AI literacy topped LinkedIn’s list of the skills professionals are prioritizing and companies are hiring for right now. And a Lightcast analysis of more than 1.3 billion job postings in 2024 found roles advertising at least one AI or generative AI skill offered an average of $18,000 more in annual compensation that those that did not.

Notably, the majority of those roles were outside the tech sector. Some 51% of jobs requiring AI skills were in non-tech industries, up from 44% in 2022—a sign coding and AI fluency are becoming relevant far beyond Silicon Valley.

The new secret to landing a tech job

Still, slowing hiring doesn’t mean aspiring technologists should give up. Instead, the CodePath data suggests candidates may need to rethink what they emphasize—and what they leave off—when applying for tech roles.

When asked which signals matter most outside the interview process, engineering leaders indicated proof of real-world skills matter far more than formal credentials. Side projects or portfolios topped the list, cited by 38% of respondents, followed by internship experience (35%), and public code portfolios like GitHub (34%).

Traditional markers of achievement, by contrast, carried far less weight. Just 4% of leaders said credentialing programs were a top influence in hiring decisions, while only 23% cited a candidate degree or academic focus and 17% pointed to school prestige.

The shift away from pedigree suggests employers are seeking evidence candidates can actually do the work. Greater fluency with AI tools and frameworks was the most common skill expectation for early-career hires, followed by faster time to writing production-ready code and the ability to learn new tools or programming languages quickly.

And despite buzz about tech layoffs, job opportunities do still exist. The U.S. federal government, for example, recently announced it would be hiring about 1,000 new engineers, data scientists, and AI specialists. No degrees or work experience is required—and salaries will range from $150,000 to $200,000. Meta has also still been hiring young talent in recent weeks, with job postings for roles such as product software engineers.

Ellison’s advice for those seeking roles is simple: Opportunities are out there as long as you are willing to dig in deeper—and build a portfolio that hiring managers are looking for.

“People are rewarded for being aggressive and for going after what they want,” he said. It’s surprising the opportunities that are hidden in plain sight.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Published

1 hour ago

December 19, 2025

Jace Porter

You’re not imagining it: The AI job squeeze isn’t some future apocalypse, it’s already quietly underway.

Professor Yoshua Bengio spent four decades building the technology that is now coming for your job. He is a computer science professor at the Université de Montréal, a Turing Award winner, and one of the most-cited scientists in the world on Google Scholar—and now he’s turned his back on his life’s work to warn that your job is probably already under threat.

Desk jobs, or as Bengio called them, “cognitive jobs, the jobs that you can do behind a keyboard,” will be the first casualties of automation.

“It’s just a matter of time,” the AI pioneer stressed on Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast.

“Unless we hit a wall scientifically, like some obstacle prevents us from making progress to make AIs smarter and smarter, there’s going to be a time when they’ll be doing more and more, able to do more and more of the work that people do … And then, of course, it takes years for companies to really integrate that into their workflows, but they’re eager to do it. So it’s more a matter of time than, is it happening or not?”

And he admitted that it’s Gen Z new-hires who are currently being hit hardest by AI, as junior roles are the easiest to cut, consolidate, or backfill with software—but eventually everyone’s jobs will be impacted within five years.

It’s not just office jobs that are at risk; even trade jobs and democracy itself are threatened

For years, degrees were pushed as the key to success for the young and aspirational looking to nab well-paying and stable jobs. But now, even highly educated students are finding themselves “unemployable” as employers launch a “wait-and-watch strategy” in the midst of AI. Graduates in the U.K. are facing the worst job market since 2018. And companies like Intel, IBM, and Google have been freezing thousands of would-be new roles that AI is expected to take over in the next five years.

But it’s not just a blip or a reflection of the current economy, Bengio warned. As more firms lean on AI and eventually robots, too, the technology will only get smarter, he said.

“As companies are deploying more and more robots, they will be collecting more and more data. So eventually, it’s going to happen,” Bengio said when asked whether AI will be able to wipe out all work. Even young people trying to outsmart automation by ditching degrees or upskilling into trade jobs are destined for the same dead end.

“So if you do a physical job—as Geoffrey Hinton is often saying, you should be a plumber or something—it’s going to take more time [for AI to replace your job], but I think it’s only a temporary thing.”

Now, knowing the devastation AI could cause, Bengio said he regrets his life’s work.

“I should have seen this coming much earlier, but I didn’t pay much attention to the potentially catastrophic risks,” the 61-year-old admitted. “But my turning point was when ChatGPT came, and also with my grandson, I realized that it wasn’t clear if he would have a life 20 years from now, because we’re starting to see AI systems that are resisting being shut down.”

He’s since founded LawZero, a nonprofit organization focused on building safe and human-aligned AI systems. But at the current rate of change, his warning is clear: It’s not just jobs, even democracy could collapse in as little as two decades.

His message for CEOs? “Step back from your work. Talk to each other, and let’s see if together, we can solve the problem. Because if we are stuck in this competition, we’re going to take huge risks that are not good for you, not good for your children.”

Join us at the Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit May 19–20, 2026, in Atlanta. The next era of workplace innovation is here—and the old playbook is being rewritten. At this exclusive, high-energy event, the world’s most innovative leaders will convene to explore how AI, humanity, and strategy converge to redefine, again, the future of work. Register now.

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Business

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Published

2 hours ago

December 19, 2025

Jace Porter

If it wasn’t for a Volkswagen bus and a calculator, Apple might never have existed. At the time, the late cofounder Steve Jobs was in his early twenties and strapped for cash, but hooked on the idea that everyone should be able to own a home computer. The only problem? Like many founders, he didn’t have enough money to bring his vision to life.

So Jobs sold off his Volkswagen bus while fellow cofounder Steve Wozniak got money for his programmable calculator, raising $1,300 to pay for the prototype’s parts. And the first Apple computer, the Apple I, was born on April Fools’ Day, 1976.

The sacrifice paid off: A local computer dealer placed a $50,000 order for 100 units soon after it launched, with the product mainly bought up by hobby enthusiasts. But it made the entrepreneurial duo enough money to create Apple II for the mass market—the first personal computer to include a keyboard and color graphics. A year after its 1977 debut, it made nearly $3 million.

“I was worth about over $1 million when I was 23, and over $10 million when I was 24, and over $100 million when I was 25,” Jobs told PBS in 1996. “And it wasn’t that important, because I never did it for the money.”

The days of selling their belongings to fund their fledgling business was long behind them.

From college dropout to $10.2 billion net worth: Jobs’ path to Apple success

Jobs didn’t discover his passion for technology in a college class; at age 12, the entrepreneur had already found his true calling, and took a massive leap of faith to pursue his dreams.

A young Jobs thumbed through the yellow pages, and hunted down the phone number of Hewlett-Packard cofounder Bill Hewlett, ringing him up for a favor. At the time, the tween was in need of spare parts to build a frequency counter. But what he received was far better than some nuts and bolts; Hewlett offered Jobs an internship at the iconic $21.4 billion tech company, where he serendipitously met a talented engineer: Wozniak.

Together, the pair started their first business, illegally selling “blue boxes” that allowed users to make free, long-distance telephone calls. Jobs reminisced about those years in the early 1970s as a “magical” time in his life that sent him on the path to soon create Apple.

“Experiences like that taught us the power of ideas,” Jobs said in the 1998 documentary Silicon Valley: A 100-Year Renaissance. “If we hadn’t … made blue boxes, there would have been no Apple.”

Jobs later enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Ore., but his days of higher education were short-lived. He dropped out after just one semester, inevitably working for legendary brand Atari as a technician and games designer at just 18 years old. That would be the last time Jobs worked under somebody else; just two years later, Apple I hit the market, and Jobs was well on his way to becoming one of the most visionary tech pioneers in modern history.

Fast-forward five decades later, and Apple is the second most valuable company in the world. The business sits in fourth place on the Fortune 500, having sold more than 3 billion iPhones, and boasting more than 100 million Mac users globally.

At the time of his passing in 2011, Jobs was estimated to be worth $10.2 billion. Although he had enough money to buy a whole fleet of luxury cars shortly after founding Apple, selling his Volkswagen proved to be a critical sacrifice in making it to the top.

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