- 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.
- Asked other people what I could do
- Tried to think radically more ambitiously
- Listed skills I thought I had and then thought of jobs that would use those
- Applied to 80k advising
- Which caused me to write up my thoughts on lost of things and answer lots of questions
- And I had a nice chat, which ended up leading to the job I ended up taking
- Talked to, on the margin, probably too many people, but SO many people
- exploring new spaces (institutional decision making, distillation, etc)
- Asking what they thought was needed in those spaces
- Talked to my friends about my job search, which led to more opportunities
- 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)
- Tried to ask a variety of questions on how I might approach this search
- What skills do I have that are helpful for the world?
- What skills will I want to have in 5-10 years?
- What might cause me to burn out? How can I mitigate that?
- What are my current bottlenecks? What's stopping me?
- What's missing in the space? What's the low hanging fruit?
- How can I be ambitious?
- What job will give the most mentorship / the manager I work best with?
- Was super honest in all work trials and interviews about my level of interest and skill and what other jobs I was applying for
- Had conversations about why this job over that one was more impactful
- Used work trials to try to assess my own interest in the work (this didn't work for me, I got excited about everything)
- Wrote another google doc when I had honed it down to three possibilities, shared it with my friends and family, got comments, thought hard.
- Made the call.
- 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
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)
That's awesome! Could you make a template of that? I did something like this to decide where to go to college.
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?
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.
I would be honored!