I imagine you can get a lot of the value here more cheaply by reaching out to people in the field and asking them a bunch of questions about what signals do and do not impress them?
Doing internships etc is valuable to get the supervision to DO the impressive projects, of course.
EDIT: Speaking as someone who does hiring of interpretability researchers, I think there’s a bunch of signals I look for and ones I don’t care about, and sometimes people new to the field have very inaccurate guesses here
I do think this can run into Goodhart’s Law problems. For example, in the early 2010s, back when being a self-taught software engineer was much more doable, and it was a strong sign when someone had a GitHub profile with some side projects with a few months of work behind each of them. GitHub profile correlated with a lot of other desirable things. But then everyone got that advice (including me) and that signal got rapidly discounted.
So I guess I’d qualify that with: press really hard on why the signal is impressive and also ask people explicitly if they agree with the signals you heard from others (ex. I heard from people in field that signal X is good / bad, do you agree with that?)
I think this is a valid long term concern but takes at least a few months to properly propagate—if someone qualified tells you that when hiring they look at a github profile, that’s probably pretty good for the duration of your job search
This advice sounds right to me if you already have the signal in hand and deciding whether to job search.
But if you’re don’t have the signal, then you need to spend time getting it. And then I think the advice hinges on how long it takes to get the signal. Short time-capped projects are great (like OP’s support on 80,000 hours CEO search). But for learning and then demonstrating new skills on your own, it’s not always clear how long you’ll need.
I imagine you can get a lot of the value here more cheaply by reaching out to people in the field and asking them a bunch of questions about what signals do and do not impress them?
Doing internships etc is valuable to get the supervision to DO the impressive projects, of course.
EDIT: Speaking as someone who does hiring of interpretability researchers, I think there’s a bunch of signals I look for and ones I don’t care about, and sometimes people new to the field have very inaccurate guesses here
Ooh good idea. I should do more of that.
I do think this can run into Goodhart’s Law problems. For example, in the early 2010s, back when being a self-taught software engineer was much more doable, and it was a strong sign when someone had a GitHub profile with some side projects with a few months of work behind each of them. GitHub profile correlated with a lot of other desirable things. But then everyone got that advice (including me) and that signal got rapidly discounted.
So I guess I’d qualify that with: press really hard on why the signal is impressive and also ask people explicitly if they agree with the signals you heard from others (ex. I heard from people in field that signal X is good / bad, do you agree with that?)
I think this is a valid long term concern but takes at least a few months to properly propagate—if someone qualified tells you that when hiring they look at a github profile, that’s probably pretty good for the duration of your job search
This advice sounds right to me if you already have the signal in hand and deciding whether to job search.
But if you’re don’t have the signal, then you need to spend time getting it. And then I think the advice hinges on how long it takes to get the signal. Short time-capped projects are great (like OP’s support on 80,000 hours CEO search). But for learning and then demonstrating new skills on your own, it’s not always clear how long you’ll need.