“Can you say more about the relative value with advising of you being “a sounding board” and “helping people think through a fundamentally difficult and personal decision”, compared to you “hav[ing] a bunch of information [advisees] don’t”?
My underlying question is whether I (and other EAs) should spend much more time concretely planning my career than I am. (See here for my background thoughts.) If advising is valuable because it forces people to sit down and seriously plan their careers, then people could get the same value by planning on their own time. On the other hand, if the value of advising is something unique to 80k—information, insights, abilities, connections—then people probably can’t replicate the success of advising alone.
In general, do you think most EAs aren’t spending enough time on concrete career planning? In your opinion, how much of the benefit of advising could be achieved by someone independent of 80k by seriously researching and planning for a day?”
As much as possible, we try to write up or discuss on the podcast information which we think would help people with career decisions, so in a way you might expect that the vast majority of the benefit of advising should be coming from things like being a sounding board. It is of course hard to find specifically the information that applies to you amongst all the information available, so that’s something I’d expect to be able to continue to help with. And people often have specific gaps in their knowledge where they haven’t come across some specific concept / possible role yet. But overall I do think it’s the case that a lot of the benefit is coming from people taking the time to sit down and think seriously about their career in a way they might not have otherwise. Some evidence for this is the fact that people fairly often report that simply filling in the preparation document for the call is useful for them. (It asks: what options are you considering and why; what kinds of roles are you most suited for; what are your key uncertainties)
I very much agree with the comment you linked to, and I’m really glad to hear you’re thinking of turning it into a top level post. I guess I don’t know how much time most EAs spend planning their career, but I would expect that for most people they could get a lot of benefit by doing more of it. Thinking through what the best types or roles apply for would be, researching specific roles and then applying to competitive things you think you only have a small chance of getting are all really aversive. Standard careers advice doesn’t tend to give a terribly helpful framework for doing these in a way that will be most impactful. So I think there are good reasons why almost all of us put too little time into this, and why having specific time allotted to it and a person to talk it through with would be helpful. I definitely think people can put themselves in a good position to make these decisions though. This article gives an outline of the process people could follow to make a career decision. Once you have some of these thoughts written down, getting a friend to give comments on it and discuss it through with you seems useful. They might also be able to be an accountability buddy, to help you apply widely even when that feels frustrating and time consuming. For many people this can get quite a bit of the benefit of our advising. That’s particularly true of those who have already read widely about EA topics and know others in the community. Having done this before doing advising with us is also really helpful because it means we can tell better which people we’ll be most useful for, and with them focus on the the parts that we can add that the person couldn’t as easily do themselves (like more in depth information, or making introductions).
As much as possible, we try to write up or discuss on the podcast information which we think would help people with career decisions, so in a way you might expect that the vast majority of the benefit of advising should be coming from things like being a sounding board. It is of course hard to find specifically the information that applies to you amongst all the information available, so that’s something I’d expect to be able to continue to help with. And people often have specific gaps in their knowledge where they haven’t come across some specific concept / possible role yet. But overall I do think it’s the case that a lot of the benefit is coming from people taking the time to sit down and think seriously about their career in a way they might not have otherwise. Some evidence for this is the fact that people fairly often report that simply filling in the preparation document for the call is useful for them. (It asks: what options are you considering and why; what kinds of roles are you most suited for; what are your key uncertainties)
I very much agree with the comment you linked to, and I’m really glad to hear you’re thinking of turning it into a top level post. I guess I don’t know how much time most EAs spend planning their career, but I would expect that for most people they could get a lot of benefit by doing more of it. Thinking through what the best types or roles apply for would be, researching specific roles and then applying to competitive things you think you only have a small chance of getting are all really aversive. Standard careers advice doesn’t tend to give a terribly helpful framework for doing these in a way that will be most impactful. So I think there are good reasons why almost all of us put too little time into this, and why having specific time allotted to it and a person to talk it through with would be helpful. I definitely think people can put themselves in a good position to make these decisions though. This article gives an outline of the process people could follow to make a career decision. Once you have some of these thoughts written down, getting a friend to give comments on it and discuss it through with you seems useful. They might also be able to be an accountability buddy, to help you apply widely even when that feels frustrating and time consuming. For many people this can get quite a bit of the benefit of our advising. That’s particularly true of those who have already read widely about EA topics and know others in the community. Having done this before doing advising with us is also really helpful because it means we can tell better which people we’ll be most useful for, and with them focus on the the parts that we can add that the person couldn’t as easily do themselves (like more in depth information, or making introductions).