One pretty mild but countervailing consideration that a friend raised to me is that it can be psychologically taxing to drop out of an application process, & this might skew your decision-making.
I know myself and know that I don’t like disappointing people (or, doing things that I imagine will disappoint people); so much so that I might end up dropping out later than is optimal, or not drop out at all until the final stage.
It’s hard to tell people no (more so for some personality types than others!), and if you know this to be true about yourself that’s a (weak) reason in favour of not putting yourself in situations where you’ll need to say no if you later decide the job isn’t right for you.
Overall, very much agree with the direction & message of the post!
One thing I’d say in response is that, as a person who’s been on multiple hiring committees and evaluated many grant applications, I’m pretty confident hirers and grantmakers would be excited for people to apply even if there’s a decent chance they’ll ultimately pull out or decline an offer!
E.g., even if someone has a 75% chance of pulling our or declining, that just reduces the EV for the hirer/grantmaker of the person applying by a factor of 4. And that probably isn’t a very big deal, given that hirers and grantmakers typically don’t have to spend long on each application unless someone has a pretty good shot of being worth hiring/funding (in which case the EV is then fairly good).
I’m aware that feelings of aversion are not always easily dispelled by logical arguments, so I’m not expecting this comment to totally fix the point you raise. But I’d guess it’d be somewhat helpful to make it more widely known/salient that (I think) hirers and grantmakers are often quite happy to have someone make somewhat speculative applications and then see what happens, and will be fine with just the fact that ex ante this was a good move.
Thanks for sharing your perspective from the hiring & evaluation side!
FWIW I already had some belief of this shape, which is why I added the caveat ‘things that I imagine will disappoint people’ - some part of me knows that the hirers are very unlikely to actually care, but another part worries & feels aversion to this.
One pretty mild but countervailing consideration that a friend raised to me is that it can be psychologically taxing to drop out of an application process, & this might skew your decision-making.
I know myself and know that I don’t like disappointing people (or, doing things that I imagine will disappoint people); so much so that I might end up dropping out later than is optimal, or not drop out at all until the final stage.
It’s hard to tell people no (more so for some personality types than others!), and if you know this to be true about yourself that’s a (weak) reason in favour of not putting yourself in situations where you’ll need to say no if you later decide the job isn’t right for you.
Overall, very much agree with the direction & message of the post!
Yeah, that seems a fair point.
One thing I’d say in response is that, as a person who’s been on multiple hiring committees and evaluated many grant applications, I’m pretty confident hirers and grantmakers would be excited for people to apply even if there’s a decent chance they’ll ultimately pull out or decline an offer!
E.g., even if someone has a 75% chance of pulling our or declining, that just reduces the EV for the hirer/grantmaker of the person applying by a factor of 4. And that probably isn’t a very big deal, given that hirers and grantmakers typically don’t have to spend long on each application unless someone has a pretty good shot of being worth hiring/funding (in which case the EV is then fairly good).
I’m aware that feelings of aversion are not always easily dispelled by logical arguments, so I’m not expecting this comment to totally fix the point you raise. But I’d guess it’d be somewhat helpful to make it more widely known/salient that (I think) hirers and grantmakers are often quite happy to have someone make somewhat speculative applications and then see what happens, and will be fine with just the fact that ex ante this was a good move.
Thanks for sharing your perspective from the hiring & evaluation side!
FWIW I already had some belief of this shape, which is why I added the caveat ‘things that I imagine will disappoint people’ - some part of me knows that the hirers are very unlikely to actually care, but another part worries & feels aversion to this.