TL;DR: How to contact me
If you think this might be helpful for you, please book a calendly (Zoom) or contact me in Telegram (or as a fallback, yonatan.cale@gmail.com). Or meet me at EAGxOxford (swapcard)
Updates
- For recommendations: see the comments to this post
- 1 month later.
- Jeffrey is doing something similar.
I’m offering help with:
- Improving technical skills.
- Career development (including earning more and working at better positions).
- Software aspects of early stage startups (this is especially aimed at founders. I hardly wrote about this in the original post, but I'm adding this bullet). [Added]
Why do I think I’ll be useful?
These are conversations I’ve been doing with friends for years.
Some results that I [conservatively] think I helped happen at least one year earlier:
- One raised their salary by over 100% in under 2 years.
- One got an entry level position as a developer (they were an analyst).
- One learned Fullstack and got accepted as a 1st employee in a funded startup.
Remember - these are cherry picked. Sometimes I talk to people and don’t help at all. But also note that I haven’t included hard-to-quantify results, such as helping someone get a better understanding of what they’re looking for, or turning something hard into something easy.
I'm mentoring two EA devs from Israel.
I’m getting a lot of positive feedback (you can ask them questions in the comments).
One got accepted to a relatively positive company (given the limited options here) that also fits many other parameters she was looking for in a job (some of the parameters were unclear to her before we spoke). We are not sure what the counterfactual is of course.
Mainly: See the comments to this post (new)
Some people who talked to me commented below.
Should you contact me?
What kinds of problems do I think I’ll be useful with?
Tech Leadership (CTOs and similar)
- “They gave me a product description, what architecture should I build for it?”
- General helpless / too many fires to put out (it's not just you!)
New technologies
- “There are so many things to do/learn, where to start?”
- “How many questions to ask my colleagues?”
- “How to approach learning about [technology X]?”
- “How to handle a huge existing code base?”
- “I’m not a professional software developer but I do use code at work, how can I get it to cooperate with me?”
Motivation / Psychology
- “How can I enjoy software development more?”
- “Am I good enough?”
- “How can I enjoy interviews more?”
Career planning / Changing jobs
- “Should I change jobs?”
- “How much money to ask for?”
- “How to improve my CV?”
- “How to aim for X longterm?”
- “Where do I want to aim?”
What will the mentoring look like?
- I’m offering long term mentoring where the first meeting will be over video, and most other communication will be with async text or voice messages.
- No commitment, we can stop anytime.
- I’m very informal. All my shirts have cats on them, such as:
My professional experience
See linkedin. TL;DR: I’ve been a professional developer for 14+ years.
I just left my last job hoping to work on an EA project, and this is one of the things I'm trying out.
Things I’m unsure about
Culture gaps
Different cultures give feedback / use social queues differently. These are usually conversations I've had with my friends and I'm only starting off with helping people who I’ve never met.
You’ll be helping me too as I make my first steps here.
How to measure myself?
The feedback cycle for improving someone’s career is pretty long, and many mentees will say they’re satisfied even if the mentor doesn’t provide much value.
To deal with this, I try asking for pretty detailed feedback, such as “what changed before and after the conversation”, as well as more “objective” metrics, such as salary increases.
How much will this help EA?
Reasons I think it would help:
- Software developers would have more money to donate and better skills to apply in the future.
- Some developers may move to EA orgs (though I won’t focus on this).
- Maybe: Developers working in EA orgs could use more mentoring and support.
The main counter argument I see is that this is a very indirect intervention, so perhaps the bottom-line impact will be low.
Why do I think this is neglected?
I think that monetizing developer-mentoring is pretty hard, so the market mostly isn’t handling it. The main exception I see is mentoring within a company, though that still often leaves some topics undiscussed, such as when to look for a better job.
How can you help?
- Refer developers to me. Also, I’m posting this before EAG on purpose - this is an attempt at getting people to talk to me about things I care about - so feel free to book a time with me there as well!
- Contacts in software industries outside of Israel. I expect to have questions like “what does it take to get accepted to one's first job there?” or “how should people look for a good company to work for in your location? (Is there a specific job board? Something else?)”
- Do you regularly mentor EAs? I’d be happy for insights, if you have any.
- Perhaps naming this project? I thought of contacting Naming What We Can ;)
I’m approaching this project like an early stage startup: I prefer launching fast and get ting feedback rather than trying to plan everything in advance. At the same time, any suggestions are welcome.
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.
Thank you <3
I'd like to add that Ori was the CTO of a bootstrapped startup that made ~$350,000 in the 1st month
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 😸
Context: CBelle is my girlfriend, and she believes I am a cat. She is correct.
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.
Hey,
TL;DR: Feel free to contact me
The main thing that would help me estimate how much I can help would be 2-3 examples of actual questions you'd ask if we'd talk today
✅ 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!
Thanks!
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:
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.
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! 😊
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 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!
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:
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 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!!
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:
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.
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!
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.
Adding: Richard is the CTO
And thanks!
Thanks for doing this! I organize the nascent EA Public Interest Technologists Slack space - I encourage you to connect with us!
Yay, thank you <3 I joined
There's also a Software Engineers in Effective Altruism Slack for those interested in private, for-profit, EA-aligned startups and other areas not covered by the incredibly awesome EA Public Interest Technologists Slack space. You can join both!!
Hey Alex, the slack invite for Software Engineers in EA seems to have expired, I tried googling for another link that works but can't seem to find any. Would you be able to generate a new one?
Does this work?
https://join.slack.com/t/ea-sw/shared_invite/zt-zka8wd10-H2LnLnyDjybOL4FOU7nomA
Sorry for late response here, but seems like it's not working either. There might only be a small window where the link is active it seems.
Well it’s been months, so it may not be a small window.
Would it work for you if you ping someone else to get a new link? I am on mobile and cannot immediately grab it off Slack.
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.
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.
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)