Inside OpenAI: Former Engineer Reveals Chaotic Work Culture and Rapid Growth

Ex-OpenAI Employee: It's a 'Very Secretive' Company -- With an X Obsession and 'No Email'

(Credit: Kevin Dietsch / Staff / Getty Images News via Getty Images) Three weeks after leaving his role at OpenAI, Calvin French-Owen has detailed his experience in a new post where he characterizes the ChatGPT-maker as high-pressure, secretive, and obsessed with "vibes" on social media. French-Owen was a member of the company's technical staff for a little over a year. He chose to leave three weeks ago, but was "deeply conflicted about it." He feels "lucky" to have been a part of the company and the team behind, Codex, OpenAI's software engineering agent. At the same time, he describes a high-intensity culture with widespread burnout. That tracks with recent reports of OpenAI leadership giving the entire staff a week off to recharge, Wired reports. French-Owen's team built Codex, an AI agent for vibe coding, in just 7 weeks. "The Codex sprint was probably the hardest I've worked in nearly a decade," says French-Owen. "Most nights were up until 11am or midnight. Waking up to a newborn at 5:30am every morning. Heading to the office again at 7am. Working most weekends. We all pushed hard as a team, because every week counted." Others seem to agree. "Most people [at OpenAI work] roughly 12 hours a day, 5 days a week," says one Redditor. "With some people working a lot harder (14 hours a day, for maybe 6 days a week), some people working less. Burn out is pretty normal." Perhaps the best move is to work hard, then leave on your own accord, which is the route French-Owen took. All of this work is discussed over the messaging app Slack. "There is no email," French-Owen says. "I maybe received ~10 emails in my entire time there." Employees are empowered to move quickly and pursue their own ideas without a lot of internal red tape. The company moves quickly and "changes direction on a dime," he says. OpenAI keeps its trade secrets close to the vest, even internally. It's "a very secretive place," French-Owen says. " I couldn't tell anyone what I was working on in detail." Leadership is especially unforthcoming about the company's financials, but one thing was clear to French-Owen: The company is spending gobs of cash on computing power. "Everything is a rounding error compared to GPU cost," French-Own says. OpenAI's upcoming Texas data centers will double electricity use in the city where it's located, and CEO Sam Altman recently confirmed the company is spending "tens of millions of dollars" on users saying "please" and "thank you" to ChatGPT. Employees are also social media hawks who take viral posts seriously. "The company pays a lot of attention to Twitter," French-Owen says. "If you tweet something related to OpenAI that goes viral, chances are good someone will read about it and consider it. A friend of mine joked, 'This company runs on twitter vibes.' There's certainly still a lot of analytics around usage, user growth, and retention-but the vibes are equally as important." That may mean OpenAI has a bias toward appeasing X users, making it vulnerable to a small group's opinions. The platform is male dominated, with 64% of its users being men, according to Statista. Elon Musk's influence also looms large on the platform, and has made the platform more right-leaning, Bloomberg reports. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is active on X. He posts daily, announcing product launches, fighting lawsuits, musing about the future of AI, and occasionally beefing with Elon Musk. Given OpenAI's X obsession, it's likely OpenAI employees are reading French-Owen's account, which could have influenced how he portrayed the company. While his is just one perspective of some 3,000 employees currently at the company, it's among the most in-depth public accounts of its culture to date. "People of different tenure and different parts of the organization have very different goals and viewpoints," French-Owen says. Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

OpenAI Engineer Quits, Says Company Is Pure Chaos Inside

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is setting a breakneck pace with his company, rolling out feature after feature to keep the multibillion-dollar gravy train steaming ahead. And that kind of drum beat, especially paired with ChatGPT's meteoric rise, is bound to cause plenty of chaos behind the scenes. In a blog post, former OpenAI engineer Calvin French-Owen, who helped build the company's new coding agent Codex, said there "wasn't any personal drama in my decision to leave" -- but he did recap his experience at the AI company in a way that painted a picture of corporate bedlam as the company grows at extraordinary speed while keeping up with a steady stream of product releases. That shouldn't exactly come as much of a surprise, given the enormous stakes. The ongoing AI race shows no signs of letting up, with companies continuing to pour billions of dollars into expanding infrastructure and poaching top talent from competitors. OpenAI's trajectory, from a relatively quiet nonprofit to the frontrunner in one of the fastest-growing tech industries in just a few years, has caused plenty of disorder. French-Owen recalled how "nearly everyone in leadership is doing a drastically different job than they were ~2-3 years ago" due to the explosive growth in headcount at the firm. "Of course, everything breaks when you scale that quickly: how to communicate as a company, the reporting structures, how to ship product, how to manage and organize people, the hiring processes, etc," French-Owen wrote. While workers were encouraged to simply "just do things," it was hard to keep up as "OpenAI changes direction on a dime," reminiscent of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's infamous "move-fast-and-break-things ethos." "The company makes decisions quickly, and when deciding to pursue a direction, goes all in," French-Owen wrote. But setting a clearly-focused direction, particularly when it comes to code, has remained a pain point. "Rather than having some central architecture or planning committee, decisions are typically made by whichever team plans to do the work," French-Owen recalled. "The result is that there's a strong bias for action, and often a number of duplicate parts of the codebase. I must've seen half a dozen libraries for things like queue management or agent loops." Interestingly, Elon Musk's social media platform X-formerly-Twitter played a considerable role. "The company pays a lot of attention to Twitter," French-Owen wrote. "If you tweet something related to OpenAI that goes viral, chances are good someone will read about it and consider it." In short, the engineer paints a fascinating picture of what the ChatGPT maker looks like behind the scenes. With this much money on the line, the company has turned into a "very secretive' and "more serious place" to work than before -- don't forget its recent turn into heavy security, including fingerprint scanners and more -- since the "stakes feel really high," per the former engineer. But despite its enormous size, the multibillion-dollar company "still has that launching spirit," French-Owen argued. As for what that means for everybody whose life and career is affected by its tech? They'll have to watch from the outside.

A former engineer reveals what it's really like inside OpenAI

Calvin French-Owen, an engineer previously engaged with a new OpenAI product, resigned three weeks ago, subsequently detailing his year-long tenure in a blog post that offers insight into the company's operational culture and the development of its Codex coding agent. French-Owen clarified his departure was not due to internal conflict but rather a desire to return to startup founding, building on his experience as a co-founder of Segment, a customer data company acquired by Twilio in 2020 for $3.2 billion. His observations about OpenAI's environment affirmed some expectations while contradicting others. He noted the company's rapid expansion, growing from 1,000 to 3,000 employees during his year there. This growth trajectory aligns with OpenAI's position as a quickly expanding consumer product company, competing with other fast-growing entities in the AI sector. ChatGPT, for instance, reported over 500 million active users in March, with user numbers continuing to climb. The rapid scaling introduced significant operational challenges within OpenAI, according to French-Owen. He stated, "Everything breaks when you scale that quickly: how to communicate as a company, the reporting structures, how to ship product, how to manage and organize people, the hiring processes, etc." This rapid expansion also resulted in a chaotic environment where multiple teams duplicated efforts. French-Owen cited examples such as observing "half a dozen libraries for things like queue management or agent loops." He also noted a disparity in coding proficiency among staff, ranging from seasoned Google engineers capable of handling systems for a billion users to newly credentialed PhDs. This, combined with the flexibility of the Python language, contributed to the central code repository, referred to as "the back-end monolith," becoming "a bit of a dumping ground." This situation frequently caused system failures or extended processing times, though French-Owen indicated that top engineering managers were aware of these issues and actively working on improvements. Despite its significant size, OpenAI retains an operational ethos akin to a smaller startup, according to French-Owen, evidenced by its widespread reliance on Slack for internal communications. He likened its operational spirit to Meta's "move-fast-and-break-things" approach during its early Facebook years, noting a substantial number of Meta hires within OpenAI. French-Owen specifically recounted the development of Codex, stating his senior team, comprising approximately eight engineers, four researchers, two designers, two go-to-market staff, and a product manager, built and launched the product in only seven weeks with minimal rest. The launch itself generated immediate user adoption. He remarked, "I've never seen a product get so much immediate uptick just from appearing in a left-hand sidebar, but that's the power of ChatGPT." OpenAI operates within a culture of secrecy due to intense public scrutiny, an effort to control information dissemination. The company monitors public platforms like X, with viral posts potentially eliciting a response from OpenAI. French-Owen quoted a friend's observation: "this company runs on twitter vibes." He addressed what he considers the primary misconception about OpenAI: a perceived lack of commitment to safety. While some external critics, including former OpenAI employees, have raised concerns about its safety protocols, French-Owen stated that internal focus is predominantly on practical safety issues. These include "hate speech, abuse, manipulating political biases, crafting bio-weapons, self-harm, prompt injection." He clarified that while societal risks are discussed, the immediate operational concern is with direct, actionable threats. OpenAI is not ignoring long-term implications; researchers are indeed studying them. The company acknowledges that hundreds of millions of individuals currently utilize its large language models for various applications, including medical advice and therapy. Governments and competitors are observing OpenAI's actions, and OpenAI is reciprocally monitoring its competitors. French-Owen concluded that "The stakes feel really high."

Here's What It's Like to Work at OpenAI, According to an Employee Who Quit 3 Weeks Ago

In a blog post, French-Owen offered insight into his time at the company, including a seven-week sprint that resulted in OpenAI's Codex coding assistant. When engineer and MIT graduate Calvin French-Owen joined OpenAI in May 2024, the startup had around 1,000 employees. A year later, OpenAI's workforce had tripled to 3,000 employees, and French-Owen was in the top 30% by tenure. In a blog post published Tuesday, French-Owen detailed what it was like to work for the ChatGPT-maker for a little over a year, from May 2024 to June 2025. He quit OpenAI three weeks ago, stating that there was no "personal drama" behind his decision, but that he was simply "craving a fresh start." Related: OpenAI Is Creating AI to Do 'All the Things That Software Engineers Hate to Do' While at OpenAI, French-Owen worked on Codex, a coding assistant released in May that competes with AI coding tools like Cursor and Anthropic's Claude Code. He described in his blog post that his team of eight engineers, four researchers, two designers, two go-to-market managers, and one project manager created Codex in just seven weeks. They worked most nights until 11 p.m. or midnight and came into the office on weekends to complete the project. "It's hard to overstate how incredible this level of pace was," French-Owen wrote. "I haven't seen organizations large or small go from an idea to a fully launched + freely available product in such a short window." He added later that Codex had reached 630,000 engineers in less than two months since launch. "I'm not sure I've ever worked on something so impactful in my life," French-Owen wrote. One "unusual" aspect of OpenAI, which French-Owen emphasized in his blog post, was that "there is no email," and nearly all communication happens on the workplace messaging platform Slack. He estimated that he received about 10 emails in his entire time at the company. Related: OpenAI Executives Look For These 3 Key Traits in New Hires: 'It's Actually My Advice to Students' French-Owen also stated that there's a strong bias for action at OpenAI, meaning that staff are encouraged to have good ideas and act on them. He characterized the startup as extremely meritocratic, promoting employees based on their ability to have the best ideas instead of their ability to present at meetings or play political games. French-Owen found OpenAI to be "a very secretive place" as well as "a more serious place than you might expect." The startup prohibited him from telling anyone what he was working on in detail, and it felt as though the stakes were high for the company to build a product used by 500 million global weekly users. French-Owen also wrote that when it comes to engineering personnel, there is a "very significant" Meta to OpenAI pipeline. He pointed out that OpenAI is similar to Meta in its early days, with a top-performing consumer app and "a desire to move really quickly." Before joining OpenAI, French-Owen was previously a co-founder of data startup Segment, which Twilio bought for $3.2 billion in 2020. Related: 'I'll Fight to Keep Every One of You': OpenAI Responds to Meta Poaching Talent, Says It Is 'Recalibrating' Pay Meta has been hiring talent from OpenAI, too. Meta recently poached top OpenAI researchers, including ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao and ChatGPT voice mode co-creator Shuchao Bi, with pay packages reportedly in the nine figures. OpenAI Chief Research Officer Mark Chen indicated last month in a leaked Slack message that the company is rethinking compensation in response to the poaching. OpenAI raised $40 billion in March at a valuation of $300 billion, the biggest private tech deal ever recorded.