Yeah, I definitely expect it’d be worth many people doing this!
I also tentatively suggested something somewhat similar recently in a shortform. I’ll quote that in full:
Are there “a day in the life” / “typical workday” writeups regarding working at EA orgs? Should someone make some (or make more)?
I’ve had multiple calls with people who are interested in working at EA orgs, but who feel very unsure what that actually involves day to day, and so wanted to know what a typical workday is like for me. This does seem like useful info for people choosing how much to focus on working at EA vs non-EA orgs, as well as which specific types of roles and orgs to focus on.
Having write-ups on that could be more efficient than people answering similar questions multiple times. And it could make it easier for people to learn about a wider range of “typical workdays”, rather than having to extrapolate from whoever they happened to talk to and whatever happened to come to mind for that person at that time.
I think such write-ups are made and shared in some other “sectors”. E.g. when I was applying for a job in the UK civil service, I think I recall there being a “typical day” writeup for a range of different types of roles in and branches of the civil service.
So do such write-ups exist for EA orgs? (Maybe some posts in the Working at EA organizations series serve this function?) Should someone make some (or make more)?
One way to make them would be for people think about career options to have the calls they would’ve had anyway, but ask if they can take more detailed conversation notes and then post them to the Forum. (Perhaps anonymising the notes, or synthesising a few conversations into one post, if that seems best.) That might allow these people to quickly provide a handy public service. (See e.g. the surprising-to-me number of upvotes and comments from me just posting these conversation notes I’d made for my own purposes anyway.)
I think the key difference between my shortform and yours is that your suggestion is broader than just “typical day in the life” or just EA org jobs. I think it’s indeed better to suggest something that’s broader in those two ways. (I had just had in mind what happened to stand out to me that day after a call with someone.)
Btw, Jamie Harris noted in a reply to my shortform:
Animal Advocacy Careers skills profiles are a bit like this for various effective animal advocacy nonprofit roles. You can also just read my notes on the interviews I did (linked within each profile) -- they usually just start with the question “what’s a typical day?” https://www.animaladvocacycareers.org/skills-profiles
So those profiles might be of interest to people on the object-level or as examples of what these posts could look like. (Though I don’t think anyone should really need to see an example, and I haven’t actually read any of those profiles myself.)
Yeah, I definitely expect it’d be worth many people doing this!
I also tentatively suggested something somewhat similar recently in a shortform. I’ll quote that in full:
I think the key difference between my shortform and yours is that your suggestion is broader than just “typical day in the life” or just EA org jobs. I think it’s indeed better to suggest something that’s broader in those two ways. (I had just had in mind what happened to stand out to me that day after a call with someone.)
Btw, Jamie Harris noted in a reply to my shortform:
So those profiles might be of interest to people on the object-level or as examples of what these posts could look like. (Though I don’t think anyone should really need to see an example, and I haven’t actually read any of those profiles myself.)