Do any of you have heuristics for when to “give up” or “pivot” in a job search? Examples could be aiming lower / differently if no response after 10 applications.

Thankfully this is not something I have to worry about for a long time. But I think it’s useful to have some balance to the usual advice of “just keep trying; job searching takes a long time”. Sometimes a job really is unrealistic for a person’s current profile (let’s operationalize that as 1000 job searching hours would still only result in a 1% chance of getting a certain set of jobs).

Thanks for this. I'm surprised how consistently the studies point in favor of vegan diets being cheaper on the whole (though I'll caveat none of these are too convincing: the headline RCT is testing a low-fat vegan diet instead of a general vegan diet and the rest are descriptive regressions / modeling exercises).

All that said, I'm wondering if perception of vegan diets being more expensive could be explained by:

• Fully plant-based diets are cheaper but various "halfway points" are more expensive.
• Meat-eaters mostly get exposure to the "halfway points". These could be:
  • The only vegetarian in a meat-eating group who's stuck buying the heavily marked-up vegetarian option at the steakhouse
  • The only vegetarian in a meat-eating household who buys groceries and/or does the cooking but can't economize on legume-based recipes.  
  • The lone transitioning vegetarian who's goes through a long learning period since they don't have a plant-based community to learn cooking techniques or new cuisines or hear where to get affordable produce.

There's some descriptive evidence from "Some vegetarians spend less money on food, others don't" (Jayson & Lusk 2016) pointing in this direction. The researchers do a neat classification trick where they split vegetarians into partial vegetarians and pure vegetarians. Partial vegetarians are those that identify as vegetarian but still report purchasing / consuming meat products. Spending is highest for partial vegetarians followed by meat-eaters followed by pure vegetarians.

Those results are confounded by demographics. But I still think it points to some things that seem under explored in these studies. Would love to hear of other studies about financial costs for transitioning vegans / social taxes for vegans in meat-eating communities

Agreed, but I'd be careful not to confuse good mentorship with good management. These usually go hand-in-hand. But sometimes a manager is good because they sacrifice some of your career growth for the sake of the company.

I like the archetypes of ruthless versus empathetic managers described here. It's an arbitrary division and many managers do fulfill both archetypes. But I think it also captures an important dynamic, where managers have to tradeoff between their own career, your career, and the organization as a whole. Mentorship and career development falls into that

Edit: Another distinction I'd add is good manager versus good management. Sometimes it's the organizational structure that determines whether you'll get good training. In my experience, larger and stable organizations are better at mentorship for a ton of reasons, such as being able to make multi-year investments in training programs. A scrappy startup, on the other hand, may be a few weeks away from shutting down.

I definitely feel a few of my past managers would have been much better at mentorship if other aspects of the situation were different (more capacity, less short-term deadlines, better higher-up managers, etc.).

Not sure what the right numbers are but I really like the back-of-the-envelope approach you're taking here. It's simple and concrete enough that it's probably going to bounce around in my head for a while

Good point. In a toy model, it'd depend on relative cuts to labor versus non-labor inputs. Now that I think about it, it probably points towards exiting being better in mission-driven fields. People are more attached to their careers so the non-labor resources get cut deeply while all the staff try to hold onto their jobs.

Maybe I'd amend it to... if you're willing to switch jobs, then you can benefit from increasing marginal returns in some sub-cause areas. Because maybe there's a sub-cause area where lots of staff are quitting (out of fear the cause area isn't worth it) while capital investment is about the same.

But I admit that, even if we knew those sub-cause areas existed, it's not quite as punchy of a reason to stay in the cause area as a whole

Marginal returns to work (probably) go up with funding cuts, not down.

It can be demoralizing when a field you’re working in gets funding cuts. Job security goes down, less stuff is happening in your area, and people may pay you less attention since they believe others are doing more important work. But assuming you have job security and mostly make career decisions on inside views (meaning you’re not updating too heavily on funders de-prioritizing your cause area), then your skills are more valuable than they were previously.

Lots of caveats apply of course. The big one to me seems that some projects need a minimum scale to work. But I also think this idea is a nice psychological counterweight to the career uncertainties that pop up with changes in the funding landscape.

(Inspired by a comment Dean Karlan, a development economist, made on funding cuts to global health)

My immediate hesitation is whether fresh college graduates would be useful enough to hosting organizations to make this program sustainable.

Last I checked, Peace Corps invests 3 months of formal training into each applicant and requires a minimum 2-year commitment in a role (to allow people to grow into competency). But this version of Animal Advocacy Corps has college undergraduates rotate thru multiple organizations for much shorter periods without any training. And I’m not sure how much demand there is for that kind of worker in animal advocacy even if it’s provided for free.

Agreed. I’d extend the claim past ideas and say that EA is very non-elitist (or at least better than most professional fields) at any point of evaluation. 

Maybe because of that, it seems more elitist elsewhere. 

Like the idea but it might be at odds with the recent AI governance shift. In general, policy folks of all stripes, especially the more senior and insider ones, practice a lot of selective disclosure.

Having done a lot of this advice in my 20s, I'd recommend just getting started with an online training program you find interesting, seems career relevant, and also not too pie-in-the-sky as a near-term plan. Throughout my life, I think there were one or two that felt unusually good or bad all-things-considered. Even then, training programs are short (~6 weeks) and have no stakes if you stop them.

(The exception is if the training somehow includes hands-on training from someone actively trying to progress in one of your desired career paths. Good mentorship is a scarce resource and you should prioritize it above a lot of other things.)

It's dramatically more important what you do after the online training program. It's extremely rare that these programs set people up to to do the "impressive project" that hiring managers want from less prestigious candidates. If they did, everyone would be doing them. 

As for the program, if you feel like you're at least passing the course (whatever than means) and it seems promising, then I'd pair that with some informational interviews. You can ask "Hey I've been doing X training course and feel like it might be a good career path. Would you be willing to chat about how you got to where you were?".

That will help you identify directions to take for your "career ladder", which I put in quotes since it's really more of a fog-of-war. Unfortunately, it's usually the things between "Step 1" and "desired job" where steps are the least clear and the most consequential. So I would save your energy for when you get there.