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- Emmett Shear was Twitch’s CEO from 2011 to 2023.
- He was also OpenAI’s interim CEO for three days in November 2023 when Sam Altman was fired.
- Shear shared the career advice he used to give to his interns at Twitch in a thread on X.
Emmett Shear, the former CEO of streaming platform Twitch, said he had a piece of career advice that he gave every batch of interns at the company.
In a thread on X on Saturday, Shear said that he’d give each intern batch a presentation on Twitch’s origins, followed by a Q&A session.
He said one question he was always asked during Q&A was: “Where should I work and what job should I get, or should I start a company?”
The answer varies from person to person, Shear said.
He outlined his advice and the thought process behind it in his X thread.
It’s an interesting question to try to answer for an intern I didn’t really know, because of course the actual answer is dependent on that person and their life. So I had to figure out how to articulate the framework I used.
— Emmett Shear (@eshear) March 9, 2025
People pursue careers for different reasons, such as money, prestige, power, and advancement opportunities, Shear wrote. But there were downsides to each of these reasons, he added.
Money is a top reason, Shear wrote, but has “diminishing returns.”
Prestige, meanwhile, is “mostly a trap, for the same reason designer clothing brands are bad deals,” Shear said. While a prestigious job “might make some less discerning people think better of you,” it will not “actually make you better or better off,” he said.
Shear added that jobs promising power only offer you “borrowed power,” especially if one has just begun their career.
“So if they’re pitching you on power it’s usually a trick of some kind. They’re trying to convince you to accept less compensation in other ways by offering a mirage,” Shear added.
Shear said some people may be attracted to “tracked jobs” that offer advancement opportunities, like becoming partners at a law firm. Such jobs may work for people who enjoy competing with their peers.
On the other hand, people could pick careers based on the work itself, Shear said. Work can be “intrinsically rewarding” when one learns and grows at their job — and that growth makes workers “more valuable in the future,” Shear said.
Ultimately, choosing one’s career path comes down to knowing yourself, Shear said.
“But in general it seems clear ppl should satisfice for cash, optimize for learning/growth, and ignore everything else,” Shear wrote.
“If you love economy-sized pain and feel like you have no other option, consider starting something. But don’t say I didn’t warn you about the suck,” he added.
Shear did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Shear served as Twitch’s CEO from 2011 to 2023 and is a prolific user of X. In addition to dispensing advice on careers and running start-ups, Shear has commented on topics ranging from his experience interning at Microsoft to whether a CEO’s job can be automated.
When OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman was fired in November 2023, Shear was named interim CEO of the ChatGPT maker.
His tenure lasted less than 72 hours. Altman was reinstated as CEO after several days of chaos at OpenAI.
“I am deeply pleased by this result, after ~72 very intense hours of work. Coming into OpenAI, I wasn’t sure what the right path would be. This was the pathway that maximized safety alongside doing right by all stakeholders involved,” Shear wrote in an X post in November 2023. “I’m glad to have been a part of the solution.”
