I've been a programmer for 20 years now, and I started the mentoring with Yonatan completly by chance, two months ago. It was eye opening - I was shocked to find out my real options for promotion, salary,  and even effective-altruistic related jobs with better terms than my comfortable current job.
He had helped me a lot in other areas as well, and gave me tools to widen up my perspective and increase my certainty of things I assumed I already know, but didn't.
Yonatan express himself in exact and direct way, with purpose and pre-thought, and he is paying full attention to me, my current state and ambitions.
This mentoring was a true life changing experience for me (for the better) and my only wish is that I had found him sooner.
 

I had several calls and exchanged messages with Yonatan for a couple of months last year while I was searching for a new job. I would strongly recommend his services. I've been programming for ~5 years now, although I wouldn't consider some of those years to be particularly high quality experience.

The calls felt a little like "career therapy". Yonatan tended to answer a lot of my questions with questions of his own, in order to help me draw my own conclusions. He was perceptive and particularly good at pointing out irrational thoughts I had around my career - it turned out there was a lot more of these than I was expecting!

Estimating counterfactual impact is obviously hard, but I'm going to try anyway. 

• I ended up getting a FAANG job, which I estimate will reduce my time to getting a highly impactful job by 18-24 months compared to offers from good-but-not-FAANG companies.
• I have slightly greater counterfactual earning-to-give potential, but I think it's negligible.
• I don't have a reasonable estimate of how likely it was to get to interview stage for FAANG companies, so I can't comment on how impactful Yonatan was in helping me land interviews in the first place (I suspect his CV review probably added a few % points, but <10)
• Without speaking to Yonatan, I would've applied for fewer jobs, done fewer interviews, been less prepared for them, and got less proficient in the process of doing them. Contingent on my getting a FAANG interview, my counterfactual estimate would be that I had a 10% chance of success, with Yonatan's help I think I was ~40% ex ante.
• If we use the (poor) assumption that I was always going to at least get the interview, I estimate Yonatan's coaching added an extra 6-7 months of direct work to my career. If his help increased the chances of getting an interview in the first place, then the impact is higher.

My biggest takeaways from his coaching:

• Have a low bar for applying to jobs, apply for lots of them, filter once you have more information about them. This helps you get better at interviews and allows you to compare potential offers against one another.
• Only write a cover letter if the job is significantly higher value than others, otherwise cover letters are likely a poor spend of your time (apply for more jobs in the time you would've spent writing them).
• Apply early, see what parts of the interview process you get rejected at, and work on that part. Don't assume you need to grind LeetCode for 6 months before you can apply anywhere - maybe you're already great at LeetCode but suck at other things.
• If you think "I would really like this job. I want to wait 3 months before applying to maximise my chances of success", email them and ask how before you can reapply in the event that you fail. Same goes for various other questions you might have - ask the company rather than not applying.
• If you are applying for jobs with the purpose of gaining career capital, ask about whether there is structured mentorship available. I found this question particularly valuable in interviews, and was surprised by the amount of times I got a long, convoluted answer that amounted to "no". If you are trying to improve, you want short feedback loops, and many companies don't have these in place.

I met Yonatan some months ago when I was making some key career decisions regarding whether to pursue AI Safety as a career or look for high impact jobs in software engineering.

While I'm still not settled for the long term, Yonatan pushed me to be more pragmatic and form a strategy around experimenting with different career paths, and in particular recommended I apply to more software engineering roles in the EA community.

Yesterday, I accepted a job offer at Rethink Priorities as a software engineer, and I'm extremely grateful for Yonatan's help. I believe it's likely I wouldn't have gotten the motivation to apply for the role (or more broadly, to SWE roles in EA) without Yonatan's coaching (as well as the excellent coaching from Abigail Novick at 80k, who referred me to Yonatan in the first place).

I think Yonatan is an amazing coach and I would highly recommend talking to him.

When I've decided on the EA career I knew I would need a lot of help. This post helped me to update my map of reality but has not encouraged me much. Plus I went in with a lot of non-trivial questions, hesitations, doubts about my 17-years-long career in IT, mild depression and not-so-mild imposter syndrome.

In the past 8 years, I estimate I've spent 50+ hours with 3 psychotherapists and 80+ hours with ~8 coaches. So I have a pretty good idea of how this works.

Yonatan's approach is very different and was effective in my case. His well-phrased question, zero-pressure nudges, and "let's do an experiment" approach helped me to land off from overthinking into action.

I wasn't hesitating when I saw this post but if I would, this is what I would tell myself: "Let's do an experiment: It will take 1 hour of your life, it's just ~5 clicks away, there are cats involved, so it might be fun, and the potential benefits are quite high."

As someone who received a lot of super helpful advice and insights from @hibukki, I think this kind of offer is priceless for one's career and skills in the software engineering field.
@hibukki might say it's different because we're very close, but to be honest I think it's harder to give professional advice to a close one than to someone you're not biased about or protective of.

I'm the CTO of a ~40 employees startup that aims to solve a big healthcare issue, and generally an very experienced engineer.
An hour with @hibukki is one of the best things I can do to improve my daily work.

Last but not least - I suggest the name Cheshire Cat Mentoring 😸

Background: I'm a mid-career software engineer (17+ years) just starting a job hunt process, trying to transition into a role working directly on technical AI Safety.

I only recently started working with Yonatan, but he has already had a positive impact. The process to start working with him was incredibly easy. Just sign up on his calendar. No payments or application forms.  A call with Yonatan is efficient and gets through a lot of topics quickly. He's very direct and not afraid to ask pointed questions when needed. He kept great good notes during the meeting that were useful afterwards. He's spoken to hiring managers at some of the organizations I'd like to work for and was able to provide detailed information on what they're looking for. He gave me a lot of advice on what I should be focusing on in my interview preparation. Lastly, his suggested approach to resume-writing was much different than I'd seen in generic advice. I completely rewrote my resume from scratch using this advice and this version seems far superior.

I appreciate Yonatan's help and suggest that anyone even remotely interested should reach out for his assistance.

This is nice of you to offer.  Could I or others refer EAs who are still taking their undergraduate degree, but are interested in and/or working towards a career in software development? 

I know ~3 Filipinos interested in EA who are 3rd year or 4th year university students, and might want to have a call (or more than one, i.e. a monthly mentoring call) with someone who could give them some advice or mentorship about software engineering.

I had an absolutely wonderful conversation with Yonatan and one in which I was quite surprised at how effectively we could debug what I actually wanted and find interesting. As an entrepreneur, it was especially refreshing to get a very no-BS, "consultancy"-like therapy session and I can see this approach help an immeasurable amount for many people. And for that matter, I'd like to learn it myself! 😊 

✅ Great initiative
✅ Thank you for a nice structure to your post, answering lots of questions I expect people would have.
✅ I think you're making sense launching and seeing what comes of the project. 

Posted in EA Sweden programmer Slack and suggested it directly to a few programmers. Hope you will all find it fruitful, best of luck!

Sharing a few messages from Dan Pandori [6 years of experience at Google and Waymo] with permission.

Context: I'm trying to figure out the impact of Effective Developers. Dan apparently got value from the CEA hiring post. I'm putting it here for reference.

P.S

Dan's also offering help with preparing for FAANG technical interviews, which I think is awesome

Talking with Yonatan has been extremely helpful to me. We've mainly communicated by Telegram voice notes and messages. He guided me through a jobhunt period, and helped me refine my plans, partly by giving feedback, partly by letting me ramble into a voice note until I had rubber-ducked myself into progress, and partly by introducing new frames for thinking about decisions I was making. It was useful to have someone to talk to who understood my motivations quite well (EA), but was at an objective distance (3000 miles), and who had relevant expertise and good thoughts. 

Some things I appreciate about Yonatan:

• He asks good questions. Including tough questions.
• Yonatan takes care to elicit my thoughts about things before offering thoughts of his own. This is good firstly because the exercise of advising myself turns up some good ideas and Yonatan is not omniscient, and secondly because copy-pasting other people's viewpoints without knowing how they got there is less useful (less generalizable and less debuggable) than imparting generative mental 'frameworks' or 'tools'.
  • One 'frame' that has stayed with me is the idea that in some situations, even if there is a small chance of someone being willing to grant your request, it might still be worth it to ask, because they might say yes, and if you don't ask, they definitely won't say yes.
  • Another example of a 'frame'. Yonatan caused me to pay much more attention to how I was feeling about things (strategies, decisions), in a quasi-therapeutic way, because he believes that my feelings carry useful information, which seems true.
• We have an informal dialogue more than a didactic or one-sided dynamic.
• He is keen to be told how he is doing, and how his thoughts are being received, in order to incorporate the feedback. He is keen to tailor the relationship to my needs and focus on the topics that are most important, even if they are not necessarily about technology.
• I felt able to be unusually honest and open about my thoughts/motivations/fears/insecurities/shortcomings.

As a result of our conversations, I feel I approached my jobhunt-related decisions in a 10x more systematic way than I otherwise would have, and I have more mental models to make future decisions with.

In summary, I highly recommend talking to Yonatan, in case he can help you.

Background about me: I am a developer with 2 years experience, now in my second job.

My brief review: I've had a handful of sessions with Yonatan and they've been great. He's friendly and kind, and has a great way of getting you to think differently about problems you're facing at work and in your career.

I'm the CTO of an early-stage startup, and have found that (contrary to my expectations) it's the emotional/grit side of things that's the most tricky to navigate, rather than anything technical. So our conversations have focused on co-founder relationships, hiring and onboarding new employees, and general thoughts around startup life.

I'm a software entrepreneur transitioning into higher-impact ventures. Had a mentoring call with Yonatan a couple of months ago. What I really liked about his approach was the structure of the call: First, gathering an overview of the issues of the table. Second, going through them in a fast-forward kind of way. And third, figuring out which ones are the most important to talk about.

The outcomes of the call directly led into the next steps I needed to explore this path.

The fact that he asked for feedback at the end of the call shows me that Yonatan is serious about helping EAs and getting better at it. I did have one or two pieces of critical feedback to his style, but these were just minor points that are to be expected for someone without a lot of coaching experience. I can recommend having a call with him without hesitation.

I founded a startup where scaling issues keep appearing as we grow the company. Yonathan has helped me identify what my main pain points are and what next steps I should take. Also, he’s really good at listening. 

I think Yonatan's initiative is really useful for anyone who has a company and wants to improve their software skills while tackling real-world problems.

I'm Nitsan, a Software Engineer with 5 years of experience serving in the intelligence force (8200 unit), and one of Yonatan’s mentees from EA Israel. 

I truly cannot recommend him highly enough!

I met Yonatan when I was preparing for my first real Job-search as a software engineer. I wanted to find an impactful job, but I didn’t know how (and if) to take this into account so early in my career, while having many other professional requirements. Yonatan had an amazing ability to guide me into developing my own tools and methods to deal with my questions and doubts, instead of giving me answers. Besides the technical guidance Yonatan gave me, I honestly feel like my decision-making process has significantly improved thanks to him, and that the methods we developed helped me get the job I wanted (and more importantly - helped figure out what it is that I want :)

Yonatan is incredibly smart and experienced, and his unique way of thinking and vast expertise (he really knows pretty much everything), really helps me see with clarity, understand from a broader perspective, and focus on the right things .

Anyone, with any level of experience, would be lucky to go through this journey with him.

Feel free to contact me (In the comments or in private) if you have any doubts or questions!

I love this idea! If you haven't yet, please connect with Devon Fritz of High Impact Professionals -- this seems like a really good fit with what they are building!!

Who am I? Until recently, I worked as a data scientist in the NLP space. I'm currently preparing for a new role, but unsure if I want to:

1. Work as a machine learning engineer for a few years then transition to alignment, founding a startup/org or continue working as ML engineer.
2. Or, try to get a role as close to alignment as possible.

When I first approached Yonatan, I told him that my goal was to become "world-class in ml within 3 years" in order to make option 1 work. My plan involved improving my software engineering skills since it was something I felt I was lacking. I told him my plan on how to improve my skills and he basically told me I was going about it all wrong. In the end, he said I should seek mentorship with someone who has the incentive to help me improve my programming skills (via weekly code reviews) ASAP. I had subconsciously avoided this approach because my experiences with mentorship were less than stellar. I took a role with the promise that I would be mentored and, in the end, I was the one doing all the mentoring...

Anyway, after a few conversations with Yonatan, it became clear that seeking mentorship would be at least 10X more effective than my initial plan.

Besides helping me change my approach to becoming a better programmer (and everything else in general), our chats have allowed me to change my career approach in a better direction. Yonatan is good at helping you avoid spouting vague, bad arguments for why you want to do x.

I'm still in the middle of the job search process so I will update this comment in a few months once the dust has settled. For now, I need to go, things have changed recently and I need to get in touch with Yonatan for feedback. :)

I highly recommend this service. It is lightyears ahead of a lot of other "advice" I've found online.

I spoke to Yonatan today regarding a new software project and found it very helpful.  I would highly recommend anyone at any stage of a project or startup to book a meeting with him; he took my meeting on quite short notice and was very helpful.

He had very specific insights about an early stage project and was able to coach me through the process of interviewing users.  Expect direct feedback which is exactly why explicit coaching is different from talking with friends or users about a project. 

I had read various advice about starting projects/startups before and thought I had an understanding, but it's very likely that you're not effectively putting it all into practice and Yonatan will identify that for you.

Near the end of the meeting after we had both agreed what the best next steps would be, he asked if I would be willing to do them right then.  He waited patiently while I  went and implemented what we had discussed. 

That was the most concrete and probably most positive result from the meeting: Right then and there completing something that I knew I needed to (and possibly had been procrastinating from). 

TL;DR: Yonatan helped me identify what I need to do, and then had me do it right then and there. A+

I'm a web and data generalist, in my 4th year of an undergrad in CS. I started speaking with Yonatan ~3 months ago while starting to apply for my first full-time job.

Some ways he's helped:

• Convinced me to apply to positions I hadn't expected to receive interviews, let alone offers for. Positions I'd been eyeballing for YEARS.
• Got me to defer accepting offers I felt lukewarm about, and complete multiple interview cycles in the meantime.
• Provided Social Accountability as a Service to get off my ass on personal projects.
• Helped me to clarify my next goals + todos by speaking actionably about them with someone else.

I wish we started speaking years ago. I think I'd be in a very different place now. I've had technical mentors in the past-- professors and senior work colleagues. None have been as helpful as Yonatan. 

• He's the first to genuinely care about my personal long-term growth, and share my core (EA) values.
• He cares deeply and thinks regularly about decision-making and professional advice-giving on a meta-level, and it shows. I've had mentors who on paper should have been a great fit, but weren't great at giving advice to someone much younger, outside the specific thing we were working on. These are all things Yonatan is great at. He always comes through with great advice, from a perspective I hadn't considered.

If you are in a similar place in your career, or anxious/uncertain whether this would be helpful for you: I'd highly recommend reaching out to him!

• He's easy-going, pragmatic, and takes a mentee-first approach.
• Also, he's a pleasure to speak with.

Thanks for doing this! I organize the nascent EA Public Interest Technologists Slack space - I encourage you to connect with us!

I exchanged some messages and had a call with Yonatan some time ago, and I highly recommend it.

He truly changed my mind on the importance of personal fit, which I had been underestimating prior to our conversation.

I often ask myself, "What would Yonatan think about this?"

I spoke with Yonatan at EAGx Oxford. Yonatan was very good at drilling down to the key uncertainties and decision points.

The most valuable thing was that he really understood the core "make something that people really want" lesson for startups. I thought I understood this (and at least on some abstract level did), but after talking with Yonatan I now have a much stronger model of what it actually takes to make sure you're doing this in the real world, and a much better idea of what the key steps in a plan between finding a problem and starting a company around it should be.

I am Yonatan's mentee. I am co-founder of EA IBM, EA Uwaterloo, and EA related-startup OpenPrinciples. Yonatan has been given me some critical guidance in building my startup and in transitioning my job from a Data Scientist/Developer to Product Manager/Product Owner.

1. How is Yonatan helpful or not helpful?
   1. Helpful because Yonatan is good at diving deep and know how deep a career problem topic can go
   2. Yonatan is good at taking a question and converting it into a fun challenge to enough the mentee (me) to think by himself
   3. Yonatan is good at accurately finding and questioning my assumptions
   4. Yonatan never enforce an idea or advice
2. where did I change my mind or change my plan (with my job / with my startup)
   1. Helped me to break my assumption of “I cannot be a good PM/PO if I not a good dev first”, my previous plan was to continue to be a dev for 2~4 more years before moving to PM/PO, even though I think I am more talented/interested in PM/PO.
   2. Helped me to pick my best focus/north-star/weekly-metics moving forward in building my startup — count how many active users do I have this week -- which could have saved us months of time
   3. By asking me a lot of challenging questions, Yonatan squished out all of my creativity in brainstorming my actions to improve our weekly-metics
3. Other people who are considering talking to Yonatan - and are in a similar situation to me - help you decide if you should contact Yonatan
   1. If you need to make up your mind between different options in a tough career decision, Yonatan is very good at helping you see a clear picture, just like what he did with me.
   2. If you are not sure you are prioritizing your focus correctly, Yonatan is great at helping you pick them by helping you find great north-star metrics, just like what he did with me.
   3. If you have a clear career goal but do not know how to get there, Yonatan is great at helping ask you hard questions to ”squish out all of your creativity” to come up with a plan, just like what he did with me.

I am a developer working on computer hardware so strictly speaking I am not a “Software” developer. Do I still qualify?

Guess this may also apply to other fields where people do not work on software but the nature of the job is very similar.

Resources thread: Common links I send people.

Learning ML (well enough for an entry level position)

Confidence in this resource: I can't vet it myself since I don't know ML. It is the default recommendation of the biggest Israeli ML/DS community, so I assume people would point out problems and I assume the big ones would be fixed. I am always aiming for maximum efficiency when learning and I can't say for sure that this is it, but I do think it will "do the job".

Here's the guide [Hebrew]. I used Chrome to translate it to English and it's still totally readable, so that's my current recommendation. Sorry this is so hacky!

EA/Rationalist Software/DS/ML communities

Slacks

Facebook

Getting into AI-Safety

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hBjrAeuGvwk9pbwLL/career-advice-philosophy-programming-greater-than-ai-safety-1?commentId=dHNHmykA2thXKdRcH#FgDTH2iENwtb6rvCD

(I'm very open to suggestions here; Not my field)