Responding here to parts of the third point not covered by “yep, not everyone needs identical advice, writing for a big audience is hard” (same caveats as the other reply):
“And for years it just meant I ended up being in a role for a bit, and someone suggested I apply for another one. In some cases, I got those roles, and then I’d switch because of a bunch of these biases, and then spent very little time getting actually very good at one thing because I’ve done it for years or something.”—are you sure this is actually bad? If each time you moved to something 10x more effective, and then at some point (even if years later) settled into learning your job and doing it really well, it might still be.. good?
No, I don’t think it’s always bad to switch a lot. The scenario you described, where the person in question gets a 1 OOM impact bump per job switch and then also happens to end up in a role with excellent personal fit is obviously good, though I’m not sure there’s any scenario discussed in the podcast that wouldn’t look good if you made assumptions that generous about it.
Alex, regarding “The next time I’m looking at options is in a couple of years.”—would you endorse this sort of thing for yourself? I mean, I’m guessing it would be a big loss if you weren’t in 80k, and if (now) you weren’t in OP. I do think it would be reasonable to have you take even a whole day of vacation each week in order to make sure you get to OP 1-2 years sooner. [not as a realistic suggestion, I don’t think you could consider career options for a whole day per week, but I’m saying that the value of you doing exploration seems pretty high and would probably even justify that. no? or maybe the OP job had nothing to do with your proactive exploration]
The thing I describe as being my policy in the episode isn’t a hypothetical example, it’s an actual policy (including the fact that the bounds are soft in my case, i.e. I don’t actively look before the time commitment is through, and have a strong default but not an unbreakable rule to turn down other opportunities in the meantime. I think that taking a 20% time hit to look for other things would have been a huge mistake in my case. The OP job had nothing to do with proactive exploration, as I wasn’t looking at the time (though having got through part of the process, I brought the period of exploration I’d planned for winter 2023 forward by a few months, so by the time I got the OP offer I’d already done some assessment of whether other things might be competitive).
My own opinion here is that people are often just pretty bad at considering alternatives. Time spent in considering alternatives just isn’t so effective, so deciding to “only spend X time” doesn’t seem to solve the problem, I think.
I do think that talking to someone like an 80k advisor is a pretty good magic pill for many people. 80k does have a sense of what careers a certain person might get, and also has a sense of “yeah that is actually super useful”, plus 100 other considerations that it’s pretty hard to figure out alone imo. It also overcomes impostor syndrome (people not even considering jobs that seem to senior regardless of how long they spend thinking) and so on.
I acknowledge this doesn’t scale well
Not 100% sure I followed this but if what you’re saying is “don’t just sit and think on your own when you decide to do the career exploration thing, get advice from others (including 80k)”, then yes, I think that’s excellent advice. In making my own decision I, among other things:
Spoke to my partner, some close friends, my manager at 80k (Michelle), and my (potential) new manager at Open Phil (Luke)
Had ‘advising call’ style conversations with three people (to whom I’m extremely grateful), who I asked because I thought they’d make good advisors, and I didn’t want to speak to one of 80k’s actual advisors because that’s a really hard position to put someone in, even though I think they’d have been willing to try to be objective. (I had other conversations with various 80k staff, just not an advising session)
Responding here to parts of the third point not covered by “yep, not everyone needs identical advice, writing for a big audience is hard” (same caveats as the other reply):
No, I don’t think it’s always bad to switch a lot. The scenario you described, where the person in question gets a 1 OOM impact bump per job switch and then also happens to end up in a role with excellent personal fit is obviously good, though I’m not sure there’s any scenario discussed in the podcast that wouldn’t look good if you made assumptions that generous about it.
The thing I describe as being my policy in the episode isn’t a hypothetical example, it’s an actual policy (including the fact that the bounds are soft in my case, i.e. I don’t actively look before the time commitment is through, and have a strong default but not an unbreakable rule to turn down other opportunities in the meantime. I think that taking a 20% time hit to look for other things would have been a huge mistake in my case. The OP job had nothing to do with proactive exploration, as I wasn’t looking at the time (though having got through part of the process, I brought the period of exploration I’d planned for winter 2023 forward by a few months, so by the time I got the OP offer I’d already done some assessment of whether other things might be competitive).
Not 100% sure I followed this but if what you’re saying is “don’t just sit and think on your own when you decide to do the career exploration thing, get advice from others (including 80k)”, then yes, I think that’s excellent advice. In making my own decision I, among other things:
Spoke to my partner, some close friends, my manager at 80k (Michelle), and my (potential) new manager at Open Phil (Luke)
Wrote and shared a decision doc
Had ‘advising call’ style conversations with three people (to whom I’m extremely grateful), who I asked because I thought they’d make good advisors, and I didn’t want to speak to one of 80k’s actual advisors because that’s a really hard position to put someone in, even though I think they’d have been willing to try to be objective. (I had other conversations with various 80k staff, just not an advising session)