A piece of career advice I’ve given a few times recently to people in AI Safety, which I thought worth repeating here, is that AI Safety is so nascent a field that the following strategy could be worth pursuing:
1. Write your own job description (whatever it is that you’re good at / brings joy into your life).
2. Find organisations that you think need thing that job but don’t yet have it. This role should solve a problem they either don’t know they have or haven’t figured out how to solve.
3. Find the key decision maker and email them. Explain the (their) problem as you see it and how having this role could fix their problem. Explain why you’re the person to do it.
I think this might work better for mid-career people, but, if you’re just looking to skill up and don’t mind volunteering, you could adapt this approach no matter what stage you’re at in your career.
There’s generally a cost to managing people and onboarding newcomers, and I expect that offering to volunteer for free is usually a negative signal, since it implies that there’s a lot more work than usual that would need to be done to onboard this particular newcomer.
Have you experienced otherwise? I’d love to hear some specifics as to why you feel this way.
A piece of career advice I’ve given a few times recently to people in AI Safety, which I thought worth repeating here, is that AI Safety is so nascent a field that the following strategy could be worth pursuing:
1. Write your own job description (whatever it is that you’re good at / brings joy into your life).
2. Find organisations that you think need thing that job but don’t yet have it. This role should solve a problem they either don’t know they have or haven’t figured out how to solve.
3. Find the key decision maker and email them. Explain the (their) problem as you see it and how having this role could fix their problem. Explain why you’re the person to do it.
I think this might work better for mid-career people, but, if you’re just looking to skill up and don’t mind volunteering, you could adapt this approach no matter what stage you’re at in your career.
There’s generally a cost to managing people and onboarding newcomers, and I expect that offering to volunteer for free is usually a negative signal, since it implies that there’s a lot more work than usual that would need to be done to onboard this particular newcomer.
Have you experienced otherwise? I’d love to hear some specifics as to why you feel this way.