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ChanaMessinger3
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That first thing is great! Ok for me to put it in the post? I like the push to think about worst/best/moonshot scenarios, probably lots of people should do that more.

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by ChanaMessinger
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Career choiceCommunityPractical
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  1. Made a big google doc of ALL the things I could do. Not just a or b but literally everything I could think of (10 page google doc of thoughts and brainstorming), shared it around a bunch.
    1. Asked other people what I could do
    2. Tried to think radically more ambitiously
    3. Listed skills I thought I had and then thought of jobs that would use those
  2. Applied to 80k advising
    1. Which caused me to write up my thoughts on lost of things and answer lots of questions
    2. And I had a nice chat, which ended up leading to the job I ended up taking
  3. Talked to, on the margin, probably too many people, but SO many people
    1.  exploring new spaces (institutional decision making, distillation, etc)
    2. Asking what they thought was needed in those spaces
  4. Talked to my friends about my job search, which led to more opportunities
  5. Asked "If I was going to work in x [AI Safety, biosecurity, etc] what would I do?" and set 5 minute timers to generate ideas. (Thank you to Michelle Hutchinson for this)
  6. Tried to ask a variety of questions on how I might approach this search
    1. What skills do I have that are helpful for the world?
    2. What skills will I want to have in 5-10 years?
    3. What might cause me to burn out? How can I mitigate that?
    4. What are my current bottlenecks? What's stopping me?
    5. What's missing in the space? What's the low hanging fruit?
    6. How can I be ambitious?
    7. What job will give the most mentorship / the manager I work best with?
  7. Was super honest in all work trials and interviews about my level of interest and skill and what other jobs I was applying for
    1. Had conversations about why this job over that one was more impactful
  8. Used work trials to try to assess my own interest in the work (this didn't work for me, I got excited about everything)
  9. Wrote another google doc when I had honed it down to three possibilities, shared it with my friends and family, got comments, thought hard.
  10. Made the call.
  11. So far, enjoying my job!

 

Some templates you could use to think more quantitatively about your job search:

  • Lorenzo's, which I also think does a good job encouraging thinking about worst/best/moonshot scenarios
  • Nuno's, which requires having the squiggle <> google sheets download

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Lorenzo Buonanno🔸4
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Great list!

Related to 1., I personally made a Weighted Factor Model with made-up numbers and found it helpful.

(I think most numbers are wrong, and many are very wrong, but they are my current best guesses)

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ChanaMessinger2
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That's awesome!  Could you make a template of that? I did something like this to decide where to go to college.

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Lorenzo Buonanno🔸2
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I'm not sure what the template would look like: different people would have different columns (e.g. personal fit, location, career capital) and the numbers are pretty random.

Were you thinking of something like this? Or something fancier with z-scores?

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ChanaMessinger3
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That first thing is great! Ok for me to put it in the post? I like the push to think about worst/best/moonshot scenarios, probably lots of people should do that more.

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Lorenzo Buonanno🔸3
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I would be honored!

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