Former OpenAI vice president Peter Deng said he views building a development team as a puzzle and made a reference to Marvel superheroes. According to him, it is worth recruiting a team of diverse specialists, like the Avengers, rather than universal employees.
Former OpenAI vice president Peter Deng said he views building a development team as a puzzle and made a reference to Marvel superheroes. According to him, it is worth recruiting a team of diverse specialists, like the Avengers, rather than universal employees.
«As a leader, you have to get your team right. You have to really look at your team as a product and think about what elements you need to maximize the range of your ideas,» Deng, who was previously OpenAI’s vice president of consumer products, said on an episode of Lenny’s Podcast.
As Business Insider reports, Deng previously participated in the creation of a number of well-known products, including ChatGPT Enterprise, Facebook Messenger apps, and Uber Reserve.
He noted that the best teams he worked with throughout his career were made up of people with diverse skill sets.
«The teams I’ve helped build — the most successful ones are the Avengers teams, which are very different, have very different superpowers. As a leader, you help work through any disagreements or arguments together, but you know you get the best results when everyone is working on different things and passionate about them,» he said.
Deng strives to recruit problem-solving people to his teams. He thinks about unmet needs and then works to hire the people who can fill that gap.
«It’s almost like playing an RPG where everyone has different sliders, and you have to build a super team where everyone really excels in different ways,» he said. When Deng was looking for new employees, he said he mainly looked for two traits in candidates: the potential for independence and a desire for continuous improvement.
Previously, GitHub CEO Thomas Domke suggested that the companies that are best at using AI will not use it to replace human labor. He believes they will hire more engineers.
