Business

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

Published

4 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

Epstein files: Trump, Clinton, Summers, Gates not returning any results in search bar

Published

1 hour ago

December 19, 2025

Jace Porter

The Justice Department released a massive trove of files related to the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein on Friday, but the site housing the information was failing to turn up any results.

The data dump came on the deadline that Congress established last month for disclosing the highly anticipated information, though a top Justice official suggested that not all the documents would come out at once with more due in the coming weeks.

While President Donald Trump, former President Bill Clinton, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and scores of other powerful men have been linked to Epstein, their names failed to come up in a search of DOJ’s “Epstein Library.”

“No results found. Please try a different search,” the site says after queries for their names.

The site adds that “Due to technical limitations and the format of certain materials (e.g., handwritten text), portions of these documents may not be electronically searchable or may produce unreliable search results.”

However, Clinton also appears in photos that were released as does the late pop singer Michael Jackson. Other records were heavily redacted.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress that the Justice Department had identified 1,200 victims of Epstein or their relatives and redacted materials that could reveal their identities, according to the New York Times.

Last month, an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote in Congress produced legislation to force the Trump administration to release the DOJ files, though emails and photos from Epstein’s estate had already come out.

One of the sponsors of that legislation, Rep. Ro Khanna, warned on Friday that if DOJ doesn’t show that it’s complying with the law, Congress could hold impeachment hearings for Attorney General Pam Bondi and Blanche.

Earlier on Friday, Blanche told Fox News that “several hundred thousand” pages would be released on Friday. “And then, over the next couple of weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more,” he added.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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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

2 hours 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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Business

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Published

3 hours 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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