Informal job survey
I’ve recently been thinking about future job prospects and ways that I might alter my preferences to increase the likelihood that I’ll be happy with my future career. I have read some of the LessWrong resources about this issue, but they don’t seem to address my particular concerns. I think there is a high relative importance for selecting a career with a high capacity for making me happy. It will consume at least 8 prime daylight hours of my work days and in many cases also some of the weekend. In all likelihood I will also be forced to sit in front of a computer for extended periods of time. The tasks I am assigned may have nothing to do with the things that I happen to find intellectually interesting or of ethical importance. And the work will likely zap me of most of the energy that I could use to pursue hobbies or other more “intrinsically worthwhile endeavors” (intrinsic to my personal preference ordering). Given that I believe these factors will largely determine whether I feel happy in many future situations and also whether I feel generically happy about the content of my life as a whole, I think it is worthwhile to seek advice from other rationalists in how to choose an appropriate career goal and take steps to pursue it.
What I have found on LessWrong, however, is that ambiguous and open-ended pleas for advice generally steer off course, even if the tangential issues are very interesting and insightful. Rather than query everyone for open advice about preference hacking, vague goal achievement, and wisdom for properly assigning value to some of the factors I have listed above, I propose a simpler informal job survey.
If you are interested, please briefly list the job you have or the job of someone you know very well (well enough that you feel you know relevant details about the job, details that may be hard to gather in less than 1 hour of internet searching). You don’t have to reveal the location or name of the employer or anything like that, just the type of job. Optionally, please also include a sentence stating whether you (or your friend, etc.) seem to enjoy the job and why. For example, my entry would be like this:
I am a graduate student studying applied mathematics. I enjoy the access to educational resources and the flexible schedule that my current job offers, but I think my personal displeasure with computer programming and my perception that future jobs doing mathematical theory are scarce cause me to dislike the job overall.
If enough people are willing to participate, my hope is that the stream of small anecdotal remarks will serve as a brainstorming session. I hope to hear about jobs I may never have thought of, and also reasons for liking or disliking a job that I may never have thought of. The goal is to spark additional search on my own and also to gauge my current preferences in light of preferences that others have experienced with specific jobs. Such a survey would be a very helpful resource allowing me to synthesize data about job directions where the initial search will have a higher probability of being helpful for me.
I am a computer programmer. In particular, I make games. I’ve started writing games in QBasic when I was 13, kept doing it on my own, and then went to a university to get a computer science degree. After that I worked almost 2 years for a company programing games. Now, I am very close to finishing my own game, which I also designed.
I really enjoy my job because the culture in game studios is very informal and fun. You meet lots of interesting people, you do lots of cool things as a company (most companies try to foster a good atmosphere), and you get free snacks. Programming is a task that’s pretty challenging and fun, you often have some autonomy, and it pays relatively well. After a year and a half of working, I was able to save enough money to take a year off and fund my own game. As a game programmer, you can also transition into very interesting sub-fields like: game design, graphics programming, tools programming, etc. Each has its own unique problems to solve, and each fulfills a certain craving in me as a programmer.
You can also choose what kind of company you work for: big one or small one, main stream or edgy/indie, well known or tiny and new. You can also make your own games, if you want, because you’ll have the most difficult tool (programming) mastered, and the rest you can outsource. My favorite part is that I can combine making games with spreading rationality. I am going to pursue this idea for a long while, and I think it will have many wonderful insights and unexpected results along the way.
I am a mathematician working at a startup in the UK. My job involves a varying mix of mathematical modelling, writing software, designing algorithms, general engineering problem solving, and of course all the usual more mundane things (meetings, email, etc.) that take up too much of everyone’s time. I work approximately-40-hour weeks almost all the time.
I am paid well but not (by a long way) Wall-Street-fatcat well. I have no managerial responsibilities. This being a startup with no revenue to speak of, it is always possible that we may go out of business. If the company turns out to be extremely successful, I might reasonably hope for a nice windfall but it wouldn’t make me rich.
My work is mostly interesting and frequently challenging. I enjoy it.
I am sat in front of a computer almost all the time. This may be bad for my health but I don’t find it directly troubling (i.e., I don’t feel any particular compulsion to get up and do something more physically active).
My main job-related concern is that highly technical jobs like this (the only sort I’ve had) are likely to become harder to get as I get older, and that I may find myself at (say) age 50 unable to find a really good job ever again.
Graduate student in math focusing on algebra and number theory. I understand that most of what I do is unlikely to create much utility and this sometimes bothers me and other times doesn’t bother me at all.
I’m an economist. I’ve taught at a university, worked for a think tank, and worked for government agencies. I’ve never particularly liked any of them and am now searching for a new career (I’m still plenty young, i.e. < 30).
Teaching at a University is probably the best, but I’m only an average instructor. I get frustrated teaching students that don’t get ideas as quickly as I would like them to and it’s exhausting.
I don’t care much for research. This can either be cause of ego (I want to make big discoveries, not small incremental ones), because I’m inherently skeptical of my results (I have some qualms with statistical hubris), or because I don’t have that je ne sais quoi that true researchers have.
Think tanks and government agencies were too political for me, although in surprising ways which I won’t go into.
As an economics graduate student trying to decide between academia, think tanks, government, and the private sector, I would appreciate it if you could expand on this. In particular, I wonder which jobs have the most novelty (not always teaching the same class or working with the same data), which encourage you to do more/better work, and which have the highest quality colleagues (rated on intelligence or friendliness).
I’m an accountant. I’m satisfied with my job, but not happy.
The work is easy and the pay is sufficient (median level for my area). I spend an hour a day in actually interesting work, another 3-4 hours in menial number-juggling during which I listen to podcasts, audio books, etc, and 3-4 hours surfing the internet or reading.
I’m sometimes dissatisfied with my work, wishing I did something with a bit more impact on the world. Unfortunately all those jobs would require several years of college debt to acquire, and would pay less than my current work, making the monetary dis-incentive very large.
I’m currently a Public Safety 911 Operator, but am training to be a computer programmer. Literally saving someone’s life who would have died had you not performed your job effectively is very cool. On the other hand, I don’t make enough money in order to do as much world travel as I (or my wife) would like.
I’m surprised that so few people have responded to this, and would be interested to know whether it’s mostly because it doesn’t seem worth the effort, or because most LWers don’t want to reveal so much information about themselves (or their friends), or because most haven’t seen it, or what.
I rarely see anything over here in the ‘discussion’ ghetto—I would not be surprised if that were true of many.
I find that there’s at least as much interesting stuff here as in the main section. Thinking of it as a ghetto is, I think, a mistake.
I’m an engineer doing research and designing processes for identifying and separating materials, working for a company with a few hundred employees. I have a lot of free reign, being one of only a few engineers working on several projects and in one case basically the only one working on the project. I like it a lot. I’m easy to please, but I suspect many engineers have worse jobs. Doing research in a field with lots of relatively low-hanging fruit is nice work if you can get it.
I have an opportunity that is kind of like this only within my area of statistical machine learning. A large entertainment company is looking to hire a few developers / engineers to do data mining on various things, ranging from visual features of advertisements and web content to user click statistics. The goal would be to make their web entertainment options more profitable and more monetizable. At first, this sounded dull to me. But after thinking more about it, using mathematics in this manner could be somewhat fun. I like data mining and machine learning, and they are really looking for someone who knows real mathematics and can work autonomously to develop novel statistical approaches to their monetization tasks. The autonomy sounds kind of high in this job, even though it would all be focused on making more money. This sounds better to me than a financial analyst job (similar job description, but the working hours would be far worse) and it also sounds better than a job doing military type research, which is one of the other things I can do with machine learning.
I’m a little scared to jump ship into the entertainment industry, though. I’m worried I will have postpartum depression over my desire to do theoretical work, on things like quantum computing, complexity, and mathematical theory.