I recently made a big career change, and I am planning to write a detailed post on this soon. In particular, it will touch this point.
I did use use Fermi calculation to estimate my impact in my career options. In some areas it was fairly straightforward (the problem is well defined, it is possible to meaningfully estimate the percentage of problem expected to be solved, etc.). However, in other areas I am clueless as to how to really estimate this (the problem is huge and it isn’t clear where I will fit in, my part in the problem is not very clear, there are too many other factors and actors, etc.).
In my case, I had 2 leading options, one of which was reasonable to amenable to these kind of estimates, and the other—not so much. The interesting thing was that in the first case, my potential impact turned out to be around the same order of magnitude as EtG, maybe a little bit more (though there is a big confidence interval).
All in all, I think this is a helpful method to gain some understanding of the things you can expect to achieve, though, as usual, these estimates shouldn’t be taken too seriously in my opinion.
I recently made a big career change, and I am planning to write a detailed post on this soon. In particular, it will touch this point.
I did use use Fermi calculation to estimate my impact in my career options.
In some areas it was fairly straightforward (the problem is well defined, it is possible to meaningfully estimate the percentage of problem expected to be solved, etc.). However, in other areas I am clueless as to how to really estimate this (the problem is huge and it isn’t clear where I will fit in, my part in the problem is not very clear, there are too many other factors and actors, etc.).
In my case, I had 2 leading options, one of which was reasonable to amenable to these kind of estimates, and the other—not so much. The interesting thing was that in the first case, my potential impact turned out to be around the same order of magnitude as EtG, maybe a little bit more (though there is a big confidence interval).
All in all, I think this is a helpful method to gain some understanding of the things you can expect to achieve, though, as usual, these estimates shouldn’t be taken too seriously in my opinion.