Note: I’m sharing this an undisclosed period of time after the conference has occurred, because I don’t want to inadvertently reveal who this individual is, and I don’t want to embarrass this person.
I’m preparing to attend a conference, and I’ve been looking at the Swapcard profile of someone who lists many areas of expertise that I think I’d be interested in speaking with them about: consulting, people management, operations, policymaking, project management/program management, global health & development… wow, this person knows about a lot of different areas. Wow, this person even lists Global coordination & peace-building as an area of expertise! And Ai strategy & policy! Then I look at this person’s LinkedIn. They graduated from their bachelor’s degree one month ago. So many things arise in my mind.
One is about how this typifies a particular subtype of person who talks big about what they can do (which I think has some overlap with “grifter” or “slick salesman,” and has a lot of overlap with people who promote themselves on social media).
Another is that I notice that this person attended Yale, and it makes me want to think about elitism and privilidge and humility and “fake it till you make it” and the Matthew effect.
Another is that I shouldn’t judge people too harshly, because I also certainly try to put my best foot forward when job hunting. I am certainly guilty of being overconfident at times.
I’ll also acknowledge that while it isn’t probable that this person’s listed areas of expertise are accurate and realistic, it is possible. A fresh college grad could have read a dozen books about each of these distinct areas, and attended some sort of training program, and had multiple informational interviews. I could imagine an industrious student with enough free time gaining some competency in a variety of areas. Is that enough to count as “expertise?” I’m not sure, and it certainly seems context-dependent: at an EAGx conference I feel okay claiming competence in certain skills, but at a conference with lots of people highly trained in those skills (such as at a PMI Global Summit) I would not describe myself as so competent, simply because the reference group is different. Compared to laypeople I know a bunch about project management; compared to a professional project manager I know hardly anything.[1]
I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised. Although I’m not a big fan of the “there are lots of grifters in EA” narrative, it isn’t unheard of for people to vastly[2] exaggerate their skills/competencies/experiences or to imply that they have more than they really do.
At a separate EA conference a person listed many areas under “Area(s) of expertise,” including one particular skill that I reached out to them to chat about, after which they replied to tell me that they actually didn’t do that kind of work and aren’t knowledgeable about it.[3]
One EA Forum poster shared strong opinions about how cumbersome regular working hours, offices in normal cities, and work/life boundaries can be. When I looked, this person also has only about five years of post-graduate work experience, all of which has either been freelance, self-employed, or running his own organization.[4] This isn’t to say that you aren’t allowed to have an opinion about “standard” offices if you haven’t spent X years in offices, but I’m skeptical of any broad and sweeping claim about a particular working style (such as “I don’t know anyone who is highly effective and gets everything done between 9 and 5 from Mon-Fri”) while having sampled that working style very little. Some offices are horribly unproductive, but that doesn’t mean that all of them are.
At least one person active on the EA Forum has an entry under Licenses & certifications on his LinkedIn profile listing Pareto Productivity Pro as license/certification from Charity Entrepreneurship, with a link to the Amazon page for the book How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit. This seems pretty deceptive to me, to list an official training or association with an organization when all you did is read their book.[5]EDIT: see this comment from Tyler Johnston for additional context.
Someone made a forum post about taking several months off work to hike, claiming that it was a great career decision and that they gained lots of transferable skills. I see this as LinkedIn-style clout-seeking behavior.
I saw another person list a job of Social Media Manager for Effective Altruism on their LinkedIn. (EDIT: it turns out that this is legitimate. I was completely wrong to look at this and conclude that a person was exaggerating their experiences.)
There are multiple people who have job titles of “senior [SOMETHING]”, or “president,” or “director of [SOMETHING]” even though they have no previous work experience in that area. Maybe that really is their official job title, but it strikes me as a bit fishy to have a title of Vice President or CEO when you are only two or three years into your career.
Related to the idea of how expertise is dependent on who you compare yourself to, there is a kind of a narrative among sinologists and China-watchers that a “westerner” who spends a week in China knows enough to write a book, and if they spend a month in China they can write an article, and if they spend a year in China they can’t even write a paragraph because they realize how little they know.
Although it could just be a less rude way to say “I don’t want to talk to you,” much like the little white lies people tell to turn down an invitation or to withdraw from a conversation.
This is just from a cursory view of his LinkedIn, so maybe he has much more relevant experience that I am unaware of. This would largely or completely invalidate this critique.
But I could be totally wrong. Maybe this person received some kind of specialized/individualized training from Charity Entrepreneurship and has their permission/blessing to put this on his LinkedIn profile, so I am simply making a bad assumption based in incomplete information.
I list “social media manager” for Effective Altruism on LinkedIn—but I highlight that it’s a voluntary role, not a job. I have done this for over 10 years, maintaining the “effective altruism” page amongst others, as well as other volunteering for EA.
Ya know what? That strikes me as 100% legitimate. I had approached it from the perspective of “there isn’t an organization called Effective Altruism, so anyone claiming to work for it is somehow stretching/obfuscating the truth,” but I think I was wrong. While I have seen people use an organization’s name on LinkedIn without being associated with the organization, your example of maintaining a resource for the EA community seems permissible, especially since you note that it is volunteering.
+1 to the EAG expertise stuff, though I think that it’s generally just an honest mistake/conflicting expectations, as opposed to people exaggerating or being misleading. There aren’t concrete criteria for what to list as expertise so I often feel confused about what to put down.
@Eli_Nathan maybe you could add some concrete criteria on swapcard?
e.g. expertise = I could enter roles in this specialty now and could answer questions of curious newcomers (or currently work in this area)
interest = I am either actively learning about this area, or have invested at least 20 hours learning/working in this area .
Ivan from the EAG team here — I’m responsible for a bunch of the systems we use at our events (including Swapcard).
Thanks for flagging this! It’s useful to hear that this could do with more clarity. Unfortunately, there isn’t a way we can add help text or sub text to the Swapcard fields due to Swapcard limitations. However, we could rename the labels/field names to make this clearer..?
For example
Areas of Expertise (3+ months work experience)
Areas of Interest (actively seeking to learn more)
Does that sound like something that would be helpful for you to know what to put down? I’ll take this to the EAG team and see if we can come up with something better. Let me know if you have other suggestions!
For what it is worth, I’d want the bar for expertise to be a lot higher than a few months of work experience. I can’t really think of any common career (setting aside highly specialized fields with lots of training, such as astronaut) in which a few months of work experience make someone an expert. Maybe Areas of Expertise (multiple years work experience)? It is tricky, because there are so many edge cases, and maybe someone had read all the research on [AREA] and is incredibly knowledge without having ever worked in that area.
That would help me! Right now I mostly ignore the expertise/interest fields, but I could imagine using this feature to book 1:1s if people used a convention like the one you suggested.
The mention of “Pareto Productivity Pro” rang a bell, so I double-checked my copy of How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit — and sure enough, towards the end of the chapter on productivity, the book actually encourages the reader to add that title to their Linkedin verbatim. Not explicitly as a certification, nor with CE as the certifier, but just in general. I still agree that it could be misleading, but I imagine it was done in fairly good faith given the book suggests it.
However, I do think this sort of resume padding is basically the norm rather than the exception. Somewhat related anecode from outside EA: Harvard College has given out a named award for many decades to the “top 5% of students of the year by GPA.” Lots of people — including myself — put this award in their resume hoping it will help them stand out among other graduates.
The catch is that grade inflation has gotten so bad that something like 30-40% of students will get a 4.0 in any given year, and they all get the award on account of having tied for it (despite it now not signifying anything like “top 5%.”) But the university still describes it as such, and therefore students still describe it that way on resumes and social media (you can actually search “john harvard scholar” in quotes on LinkedIn and see the flexing yourself). Which just illustrates how even large, reputable institutions support this practice through fluffy, misleading awards and certifications.
This post actually spurred me to go and remove the award from my LinkedIn, but I still think it’s very easy and normal to accidentally do things that make yourself look better in a resume — especially when there is a “technically true” justificaiton for it (like “the school told me I’m in the top 5%” or “the book told me I could add this to my resume!”), whether or not this is really all that informative for future employers. Also, in the back of my mind, I wonder whether choosing to not do this sort of resume padding creates bad selection effects that lead to people with more integrity being hired less, meaning even high-integrity people should be partaking in resume padding so long as everyone else is (Moloch everywhere!). Maybe the best answer is just making sure hiring comittees have good bullshit detectors and lean more on work trials/demonstrated aptitude over fancy certifications/job titles.
I double-checked my copy of How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit — and sure enough, towards the end of the chapter on productivity, the book actually encourages the reader to add that title to their Linkedin verbatim. Not explicitly as a certification, nor with CE as the certifier, but just in general..
Thanks for mentioning this. I wasn’t aware of this context, which changes my initial guesswork quite a bit. I just looked it up at in Chapter 10 (Take Planning), section 10.6 has this phrase: “As you implement most or some of the practices introduced here, you have every right to add the title Pareto Productivity Pro to your business card and LinkedIn profile.” So I guess that is endorsed by Charity Entrepreneurship. While I disagree with their choice to encourage people to add what I view as a meaningless title to LinkedIn, I think it I can’t put so much blame on the individual who did this.
Yeah, agreed that it’s an odd suggestion. The idea of putting it on a business card feels so counterintuitive to me that I wonder how literally it’s meant to be taken, or if the sentence is really just a rhetorical device the authors are using to encourage the reader.
choosing to not do this sort of resume padding creates bad selection
That is definitely something for us to be aware of. The simplistic narrative of “lots of people are exaggerating and inflating their experiences/skills, so if I don’t do it I will be at a disadvantage” is something that I think of when I am trying to figure out wording on a resume.
Someone made a forum post about taking several months off work to hike, claiming that it was a great career decision and that they gained lots of transferable skills. I see this as LinkedIn-style clout-seeking behavior.
I am curious why you think this i) gains them clout or ii) was written with that intention?
It seems very different to the other examples, which seem about claiming unfair competencies or levels of impact etc.
I personally think that taking time off work to hike is more likely to cost you status than give you status in EA circles! I therefore read that post as an attempt to promote new community norms (around work and life balance and self-discovery etc) than to gain status.
One disclaimer here is that I think I know this person, so I am probably biased. I am genuinely curious though and not feeling defensive etc.
Sure, I’ll try to type out some thoughts on this. I’ve spent about 20-30 minutes pondering this, and this is what I’ve come up with.
I’ll start by saying I don’t view this hiking post as a huge travesty; I have a general/vague feeling of a little yuckiness (and I’ll acknowledge that such gut instincts/reactions are not always a good guide to clear thinking), and I’ll also readily acknowledge that just because I interpret a particular meaning doesn’t mean that other people interpreted the same meaning (nor that the author intended that meaning).
(I’ll also note that if the author of that hiking post reads this: I have absolutely no ill-will toward you. I am not angry, I enjoyed reading about your hike, and it looked really fun. I know that tone is hard to portray in writing, and that the internet is often a fraught place with petty and angry people around every corner. If you are reading this it might come across as if I am angrily smashing my keyword simply because I disagree with something. I assure you that I am not angry. I am sipping my tea with a soft smile while I type about your post. I view this less like “let’s attack this person for some perceived slight” and more like “let’s explore the semantics and implied causation of an experience.”)
One factor is that it doesn’t seem generalizable. If 10,000 people took time off work to do a hike, how many of them would have the same positive results? From the perspective of simply sharing a story of “this is what happened to me” I think it is fine. But the messaging of “this specific action I took helped me get a new job” seems like the career equivalent of “I picked this stock and it went up during a decade-long bear market, so I will share my story about how I got wealthy.”
A second factor is the cause-and-effect. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that the author’s network played a much larger role in getting a job than the skills picked up while hiking. The framing of the post was “It was a great career decision. I gained confidence and perspective, but also lots of transferable and work-applicable skills: persistence, attention to detail, organization, decision-making under pressure...” And I’m looking at this and thinking that those are all context-dependent skills. Just because you have an eye for detail or skill with organization when it comes to your backpack, it doesn’t mean that you will when you are looking at a spreadsheet. Just because you can make a decision when you slip down the side of a mountain doesn’t mean you can make a decision in a board room.
And I think a third factors is general vibes: it felt very self-promotional to me.[1] It struck me as similar to LinkedIn content in which something completely unrelated to work and professional life occurs, and then is squeezed into a box in order to be presented as a work-appropriate narrative with a career-relevant takeaway.
So I’ll frame this in a way that is more discussion-based: how context dependent are these kinds of general/broad skills? Taking attention to detail as an example, I can be very attentive to a system that I am familiar with and pretty change blind in a foreign setting (I notice slight changes in font in a spreadsheet, but I won’t notice if a friend got a new haircut).[2] Persistence (or determination, or grit) is also highly dependent on the person’s motivation for the particular task they are working on. How accurate is it to claim to have gained these skills on a hike, to the extent that they benefit you in an office job?
According to some IO Psychologist contacts (this is two quotes smushed together and lightly edited from when I was chatting about this topic):
Personality traits generally only have significant change in such a short period of time (and six months counts as a short period of time when looking at a human life) when there are severe or sudden life events; my impression is that such change is very rare. I struggle to believe a six month hike is going to change a personality long-term. I’m definitely skeptical… To me, the author saying it was a great career decision either means A) they were burnt out and this was a chance to take some time to recover, or B) they’re overselling it, maybe for online clout or maybe to justify taking six months off work. For any life lessons/soft skills learned in six months on a trail my perspective is it would be difficult to link them directly to a job (unless it is an outdoorsy, trail guide kind of job).
I think that I tend to be more averse to marketing and self-promotional behavior than the average person, so it is possible that 100 people look at that post and 80 or 90 of them feel it isn’t self-promotional.
I’ve actually had colleagues/managers from two different professional contexts describe me as extremely attentive to detail, noticing things that nobody else did and insufficiently attentive to detail, to the extent that I am not competent to do the job (these are not direct quotes, but rather my rough characterization). The context matters a lot for how good we are at things. Determination is an easy example to illustrate the importance of context: think of doing a dull, mundane task as opposed to one you find inherently interesting and engaging.
I don’t know if this is a fair assessment, but it’s hard for me to expect anything else as long as many EAs are getting sourced from elite universities, since that’s basically the planetary focus for the consumption and production of inflated credentials.
The main Swapcard example you mention seems to me like a misunderstanding of EAGs and 1-1s.
To take consulting as an example, say I am a 1st year undergrad looking to get into management consulting. I don’t need to speak to a consulting expert (probably they should change the name to be about experience instead of expertise), but I’d be very keen to get advice from someone who recently went through the whole consulting hiring process and got multiple offers, say someone a month out of undergrad.
Or another hypothetical: say I’m really interested in working in an operations/HR role within global health. I reach out to the handful of experts in the field who will be at the conference, but I want to fit in as many 1-1s as I can, and anyway the experts may be too busy, so I also reach out to someone who did an internship on the operations team of a global health charity during college. They’re not an expert in the field, but they could still brain-dump a bunch of stuff they learnt from the internship in 25 min.
And these could be about the same recently graduated person.
With the trekking example, I also know the person, and it seems extremely unlikely to me they were trying to gain power or influence (ie clout), by writing the post. It also seems to be the case that it did result in some minor outdoorsy career opportunities.
A lot of the points about transferability seem like they would apply to many job to job changes—e.g. ‘why would you think your experience running a startup would be transferable to working for a large corporation?’ But people change career direction all the time, and indeed EA has a large focus on helping people to do so.
Yes, it refers to a position. So if this is actually someone’s job title, then there kind of isn’t anything wrong with it. And I sympathize with people who found or start their own organization. If I am 22 and I’ve never had a job before but I create a startup, I am the CEO.
So by the denotation there is nothing wrong with it. The connotation makes it a bit tricky, because (generally speaking) the title of CEO (or director, or senior manager, or similar titles) refers to people with a lot of professional experience. I perceive a certain level of … self-aggrandizement? inflating one’s reputation? status-seeking? I’m not quite sure how to articulate the somewhat icky feeling I have about people giving themselves impressive-sounding titles.
Note: I’m sharing this an undisclosed period of time after the conference has occurred, because I don’t want to inadvertently reveal who this individual is, and I don’t want to embarrass this person.
I’m preparing to attend a conference, and I’ve been looking at the Swapcard profile of someone who lists many areas of expertise that I think I’d be interested in speaking with them about: consulting, people management, operations, policymaking, project management/program management, global health & development… wow, this person knows about a lot of different areas. Wow, this person even lists Global coordination & peace-building as an area of expertise! And Ai strategy & policy! Then I look at this person’s LinkedIn. They graduated from their bachelor’s degree one month ago. So many things arise in my mind.
One is about how this typifies a particular subtype of person who talks big about what they can do (which I think has some overlap with “grifter” or “slick salesman,” and has a lot of overlap with people who promote themselves on social media).
Another is that I notice that this person attended Yale, and it makes me want to think about elitism and privilidge and humility and “fake it till you make it” and the Matthew effect.
Another is that I shouldn’t judge people too harshly, because I also certainly try to put my best foot forward when job hunting. I am certainly guilty of being overconfident at times.
I’ll also acknowledge that while it isn’t probable that this person’s listed areas of expertise are accurate and realistic, it is possible. A fresh college grad could have read a dozen books about each of these distinct areas, and attended some sort of training program, and had multiple informational interviews. I could imagine an industrious student with enough free time gaining some competency in a variety of areas. Is that enough to count as “expertise?” I’m not sure, and it certainly seems context-dependent: at an EAGx conference I feel okay claiming competence in certain skills, but at a conference with lots of people highly trained in those skills (such as at a PMI Global Summit) I would not describe myself as so competent, simply because the reference group is different. Compared to laypeople I know a bunch about project management; compared to a professional project manager I know hardly anything.[1]
I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised. Although I’m not a big fan of the “there are lots of grifters in EA” narrative, it isn’t unheard of for people to
vastly[2] exaggerate their skills/competencies/experiences or to imply that they have more than they really do.At a separate EA conference a person listed many areas under “Area(s) of expertise,” including one particular skill that I reached out to them to chat about, after which they replied to tell me that they actually didn’t do that kind of work and aren’t knowledgeable about it.[3]
One EA Forum poster shared strong opinions about how cumbersome regular working hours, offices in normal cities, and work/life boundaries can be. When I looked, this person also has only about five years of post-graduate work experience, all of which has either been freelance, self-employed, or running his own organization.[4] This isn’t to say that you aren’t allowed to have an opinion about “standard” offices if you haven’t spent X years in offices, but I’m skeptical of any broad and sweeping claim about a particular working style (such as “I don’t know anyone who is highly effective and gets everything done between 9 and 5 from Mon-Fri”) while having sampled that working style very little. Some offices are horribly unproductive, but that doesn’t mean that all of them are.
At least one person active on the EA Forum has an entry under Licenses & certifications on his LinkedIn profile listing Pareto Productivity Pro as license/certification from Charity Entrepreneurship, with a link to the Amazon page for the book How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit. This seems pretty deceptive to me, to list an official training or association with an organization when all you did is read their book.[5] EDIT: see this comment from Tyler Johnston for additional context.
Someone made a forum post about taking several months off work to hike, claiming that it was a great career decision and that they gained lots of transferable skills. I see this as LinkedIn-style clout-seeking behavior.
I saw another person list a job ofSocial Media ManagerforEffective Altruismon their LinkedIn. (EDIT: it turns out that this is legitimate. I was completely wrong to look at this and conclude that a person was exaggerating their experiences.)There are multiple people who have job titles of “senior [SOMETHING]”, or “president,” or “director of [SOMETHING]” even though they have no previous work experience in that area. Maybe that really is their official job title, but it strikes me as a bit fishy to have a title of Vice President or CEO when you are only two or three years into your career.
Related to the idea of how expertise is dependent on who you compare yourself to, there is a kind of a narrative among sinologists and China-watchers that a “westerner” who spends a week in China knows enough to write a book, and if they spend a month in China they can write an article, and if they spend a year in China they can’t even write a paragraph because they realize how little they know.
EDIT: I think this reads as too combative/aggressive, so I’m taking this word out.
Although it could just be a less rude way to say “I don’t want to talk to you,” much like the little white lies people tell to turn down an invitation or to withdraw from a conversation.
This is just from a cursory view of his LinkedIn, so maybe he has much more relevant experience that I am unaware of. This would largely or completely invalidate this critique.
But I could be totally wrong. Maybe this person received some kind of specialized/individualized training from Charity Entrepreneurship and has their permission/blessing to put this on his LinkedIn profile, so I am simply making a bad assumption based in incomplete information.
I list “social media manager” for Effective Altruism on LinkedIn—but I highlight that it’s a voluntary role, not a job. I have done this for over 10 years, maintaining the “effective altruism” page amongst others, as well as other volunteering for EA.
Ya know what? That strikes me as 100% legitimate. I had approached it from the perspective of “there isn’t an organization called Effective Altruism, so anyone claiming to work for it is somehow stretching/obfuscating the truth,” but I think I was wrong. While I have seen people use an organization’s name on LinkedIn without being associated with the organization, your example of maintaining a resource for the EA community seems permissible, especially since you note that it is volunteering.
+1 to the EAG expertise stuff, though I think that it’s generally just an honest mistake/conflicting expectations, as opposed to people exaggerating or being misleading. There aren’t concrete criteria for what to list as expertise so I often feel confused about what to put down.
@Eli_Nathan maybe you could add some concrete criteria on swapcard?
e.g. expertise = I could enter roles in this specialty now and could answer questions of curious newcomers (or currently work in this area)
interest = I am either actively learning about this area, or have invested at least 20 hours learning/working in this area .
Hi Caleb,
Ivan from the EAG team here — I’m responsible for a bunch of the systems we use at our events (including Swapcard).
Thanks for flagging this! It’s useful to hear that this could do with more clarity. Unfortunately, there isn’t a way we can add help text or sub text to the Swapcard fields due to Swapcard limitations. However, we could rename the labels/field names to make this clearer..?
For example
Areas of Expertise (3+ months work experience)
Areas of Interest (actively seeking to learn more)
Does that sound like something that would be helpful for you to know what to put down? I’ll take this to the EAG team and see if we can come up with something better. Let me know if you have other suggestions!
For what it is worth, I’d want the bar for expertise to be a lot higher than a few months of work experience. I can’t really think of any common career (setting aside highly specialized fields with lots of training, such as astronaut) in which a few months of work experience make someone an expert. Maybe Areas of Expertise (multiple years work experience)? It is tricky, because there are so many edge cases, and maybe someone had read all the research on [AREA] and is incredibly knowledge without having ever worked in that area.
That would help me! Right now I mostly ignore the expertise/interest fields, but I could imagine using this feature to book 1:1s if people used a convention like the one you suggested.
The mention of “Pareto Productivity Pro” rang a bell, so I double-checked my copy of How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit — and sure enough, towards the end of the chapter on productivity, the book actually encourages the reader to add that title to their Linkedin verbatim. Not explicitly as a certification, nor with CE as the certifier, but just in general. I still agree that it could be misleading, but I imagine it was done in fairly good faith given the book suggests it.
However, I do think this sort of resume padding is basically the norm rather than the exception. Somewhat related anecode from outside EA: Harvard College has given out a named award for many decades to the “top 5% of students of the year by GPA.” Lots of people — including myself — put this award in their resume hoping it will help them stand out among other graduates.
The catch is that grade inflation has gotten so bad that something like 30-40% of students will get a 4.0 in any given year, and they all get the award on account of having tied for it (despite it now not signifying anything like “top 5%.”) But the university still describes it as such, and therefore students still describe it that way on resumes and social media (you can actually search “john harvard scholar” in quotes on LinkedIn and see the flexing yourself). Which just illustrates how even large, reputable institutions support this practice through fluffy, misleading awards and certifications.
This post actually spurred me to go and remove the award from my LinkedIn, but I still think it’s very easy and normal to accidentally do things that make yourself look better in a resume — especially when there is a “technically true” justificaiton for it (like “the school told me I’m in the top 5%” or “the book told me I could add this to my resume!”), whether or not this is really all that informative for future employers. Also, in the back of my mind, I wonder whether choosing to not do this sort of resume padding creates bad selection effects that lead to people with more integrity being hired less, meaning even high-integrity people should be partaking in resume padding so long as everyone else is (Moloch everywhere!). Maybe the best answer is just making sure hiring comittees have good bullshit detectors and lean more on work trials/demonstrated aptitude over fancy certifications/job titles.
Thanks for mentioning this. I wasn’t aware of this context, which changes my initial guesswork quite a bit. I just looked it up at in Chapter 10 (Take Planning), section 10.6 has this phrase: “As you implement most or some of the practices introduced here, you have every right to add the title Pareto Productivity Pro to your business card and LinkedIn profile.” So I guess that is endorsed by Charity Entrepreneurship. While I disagree with their choice to encourage people to add what I view as a meaningless title to LinkedIn, I think it I can’t put so much blame on the individual who did this.
Yeah, agreed that it’s an odd suggestion. The idea of putting it on a business card feels so counterintuitive to me that I wonder how literally it’s meant to be taken, or if the sentence is really just a rhetorical device the authors are using to encourage the reader.
That is definitely something for us to be aware of. The simplistic narrative of “lots of people are exaggerating and inflating their experiences/skills, so if I don’t do it I will be at a disadvantage” is something that I think of when I am trying to figure out wording on a resume.
Thanks for writing this, Joseph.
Minor, but I don’t really understand this claim:
Someone made a forum post about taking several months off work to hike, claiming that it was a great career decision and that they gained lots of transferable skills. I see this as LinkedIn-style clout-seeking behavior.
I am curious why you think this i) gains them clout or ii) was written with that intention?
It seems very different to the other examples, which seem about claiming unfair competencies or levels of impact etc.
I personally think that taking time off work to hike is more likely to cost you status than give you status in EA circles! I therefore read that post as an attempt to promote new community norms (around work and life balance and self-discovery etc) than to gain status.
One disclaimer here is that I think I know this person, so I am probably biased. I am genuinely curious though and not feeling defensive etc.
Sure, I’ll try to type out some thoughts on this. I’ve spent about 20-30 minutes pondering this, and this is what I’ve come up with.
I’ll start by saying I don’t view this hiking post as a huge travesty; I have a general/vague feeling of a little yuckiness (and I’ll acknowledge that such gut instincts/reactions are not always a good guide to clear thinking), and I’ll also readily acknowledge that just because I interpret a particular meaning doesn’t mean that other people interpreted the same meaning (nor that the author intended that meaning).
(I’ll also note that if the author of that hiking post reads this: I have absolutely no ill-will toward you. I am not angry, I enjoyed reading about your hike, and it looked really fun. I know that tone is hard to portray in writing, and that the internet is often a fraught place with petty and angry people around every corner. If you are reading this it might come across as if I am angrily smashing my keyword simply because I disagree with something. I assure you that I am not angry. I am sipping my tea with a soft smile while I type about your post. I view this less like “let’s attack this person for some perceived slight” and more like “let’s explore the semantics and implied causation of an experience.”)
One factor is that it doesn’t seem generalizable. If 10,000 people took time off work to do a hike, how many of them would have the same positive results? From the perspective of simply sharing a story of “this is what happened to me” I think it is fine. But the messaging of “this specific action I took helped me get a new job” seems like the career equivalent of “I picked this stock and it went up during a decade-long bear market, so I will share my story about how I got wealthy.”
A second factor is the cause-and-effect. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that the author’s network played a much larger role in getting a job than the skills picked up while hiking. The framing of the post was “It was a great career decision. I gained confidence and perspective, but also lots of transferable and work-applicable skills: persistence, attention to detail, organization, decision-making under pressure...” And I’m looking at this and thinking that those are all context-dependent skills. Just because you have an eye for detail or skill with organization when it comes to your backpack, it doesn’t mean that you will when you are looking at a spreadsheet. Just because you can make a decision when you slip down the side of a mountain doesn’t mean you can make a decision in a board room.
And I think a third factors is general vibes: it felt very self-promotional to me.[1] It struck me as similar to LinkedIn content in which something completely unrelated to work and professional life occurs, and then is squeezed into a box in order to be presented as a work-appropriate narrative with a career-relevant takeaway.
So I’ll frame this in a way that is more discussion-based: how context dependent are these kinds of general/broad skills? Taking attention to detail as an example, I can be very attentive to a system that I am familiar with and pretty change blind in a foreign setting (I notice slight changes in font in a spreadsheet, but I won’t notice if a friend got a new haircut).[2] Persistence (or determination, or grit) is also highly dependent on the person’s motivation for the particular task they are working on. How accurate is it to claim to have gained these skills on a hike, to the extent that they benefit you in an office job?
According to some IO Psychologist contacts (this is two quotes smushed together and lightly edited from when I was chatting about this topic):
I think that I tend to be more averse to marketing and self-promotional behavior than the average person, so it is possible that 100 people look at that post and 80 or 90 of them feel it isn’t self-promotional.
I’ve actually had colleagues/managers from two different professional contexts describe me as extremely attentive to detail, noticing things that nobody else did and insufficiently attentive to detail, to the extent that I am not competent to do the job (these are not direct quotes, but rather my rough characterization). The context matters a lot for how good we are at things. Determination is an easy example to illustrate the importance of context: think of doing a dull, mundane task as opposed to one you find inherently interesting and engaging.
Thanks for the detailed response, I appreciate it!
I don’t know if this is a fair assessment, but it’s hard for me to expect anything else as long as many EAs are getting sourced from elite universities, since that’s basically the planetary focus for the consumption and production of inflated credentials.
The main Swapcard example you mention seems to me like a misunderstanding of EAGs and 1-1s.
To take consulting as an example, say I am a 1st year undergrad looking to get into management consulting. I don’t need to speak to a consulting expert (probably they should change the name to be about experience instead of expertise), but I’d be very keen to get advice from someone who recently went through the whole consulting hiring process and got multiple offers, say someone a month out of undergrad.
Or another hypothetical: say I’m really interested in working in an operations/HR role within global health. I reach out to the handful of experts in the field who will be at the conference, but I want to fit in as many 1-1s as I can, and anyway the experts may be too busy, so I also reach out to someone who did an internship on the operations team of a global health charity during college. They’re not an expert in the field, but they could still brain-dump a bunch of stuff they learnt from the internship in 25 min.
And these could be about the same recently graduated person.
With the trekking example, I also know the person, and it seems extremely unlikely to me they were trying to gain power or influence (ie clout), by writing the post. It also seems to be the case that it did result in some minor outdoorsy career opportunities.
A lot of the points about transferability seem like they would apply to many job to job changes—e.g. ‘why would you think your experience running a startup would be transferable to working for a large corporation?’ But people change career direction all the time, and indeed EA has a large focus on helping people to do so.
I agree with everything but the last point. Director or CEO simply refers to a name of the position, doesn’t it?
Yes, it refers to a position. So if this is actually someone’s job title, then there kind of isn’t anything wrong with it. And I sympathize with people who found or start their own organization. If I am 22 and I’ve never had a job before but I create a startup, I am the CEO.
So by the denotation there is nothing wrong with it. The connotation makes it a bit tricky, because (generally speaking) the title of CEO (or director, or senior manager, or similar titles) refers to people with a lot of professional experience. I perceive a certain level of … self-aggrandizement? inflating one’s reputation? status-seeking? I’m not quite sure how to articulate the somewhat icky feeling I have about people giving themselves impressive-sounding titles.