Goal

I want to create maximum impact over my entire career. It could be either by earning-to-give or by gaining sufficient career captial and using that to create the max impact, by founding companies or using my research knowledge. When I say Career capital, I refer to skills, runway, connections that I could gain while in a job that could help me further my goals.

I am 26 right now (soon to be 27) and I would like to make the rest of the 80000 hrs of my career count.

A brief look into the what has been done in the past

The career series of posts were written with the idea of helping me understand what I needed to do w.r.t my career and how to get there.The primary goal that is expected to drive all change and actions in my life is based of this Answers post.

So in first career post we saw some basics about careers and the roughly took some data and saw where we could see ourselves in the future. In the following post on Dream Jobs, we discussed what should be there in a dream job, such as flow, moderate amount of stress etc… This post has a synopsis of the research on stress and my final understanding, which is that stress is not really a very bad thing to health. The post also contains some of my understanding, some evidence regarding long hours, stress and vacation.

The next post (3) was written for the sake of completeness i guess. It talks about how one person can make a difference, pretty much echoing the centiments shared by 80k hours.

There’s no reason to be embarrassed by this fact, but it does emphasize how important it is to consider how you can use your good fortune to help others. In a more equal and intuitive world, we could just focus on helping those around us, and making our own lives go well. But it turns out we have an enormous opportunity to help other people with little cost to ourselves – and it would be a terrible shame to squander it.

In the forth post we see the existing problems in the world that need attentiona and try to focus on a few of the problems and see where it takes us, while briefly looking into what we need to do to maximize our impact. With this post it is quite clear that there are several opportunities, and a proper analysis needs to be made so that we can start in this direction this year.

In the fifth post (5) we discuss about how the suggestion of 80k hrs is to start with direct work if possible rather than earning to give. As it is not a shortage of funds that is the major problem but the using of the funds in an effective way or channelling funds to the right medium to create large/right impact. This is quite an eye opener, as earning to give seemed like the way to go a few months back.

All these posts are written not with a proper beginning or end. I apologise. Most of the work was done on the last day with a deadline, even with this post ( :( ). I think what would be best now would be to summarize briefly the findings from 80k hours until now and use it to see what directions are the best for me. Starting with say profiling different fields, putting up my key uncertainities and maybe estimating the impact of each direction that could be chosen.

Before that I also quickly make a synopsis of the 80k hours links…

The 80K Guide

Direct work vs indirect work (earning to give)

80k hours high impact jobs suggest the following as the different ways to contribute:

• Earning to give
• Advocacy
• Research
• Direct work

According to 80k hours website, we see that we should first invest in Direct working over long term, unless otherwise not possible. I can’t imagine what my contribution does when it is a meager 4k euros. Yes there are websites that allow you to calculate that. Roughly speaking I can save one full life (according to GiveWell). I certainly think I can do more, and as a human we want to maximize our potential.

80,000 Hours thinks that only a small proportion of people should earn to give long term. we think that most people should be doing things like politics, policy, high-value research, for-profit and non-profit entrepreneurship, and direct work for highly socially valuable organizations.

I am not fully sure when I will know direct work is not for me. Say I was running a successful business, I guess I would focus on just that, and pump hopefully in low 100k’s (25 lives) to effective organizations.

And so, for now I would also like to look at how I can get to directwork positions.

Choosing an area to focus

Basically, work on neglected, solvable, personal-fit-making-sense, expertise-making-sense type of problems .

I don’t know now what problem I want to work on ( I should be working on). There are so many unknowns and as expressed in the career planning part of the 80k hours website, it is quite hard to determine the next 25 years of your life. It is better to be broadly focussed with transferrable skill to move to the place of most need. Hopefully with time there is more clarity, skills shape up. But there is one thing I need to do in every job or education, I need to excel. I need to know my shit and be good at it.

Best approaches; Which jobs are great?

What types of jobs do the worlds most important problems need? This post(5) written by me briefly discusses the actions suggested in 80k hours high impact jobs. The actions are about understanding what career paths, pertain to a particular area of focus. This is what is required for some of the areas in focus such as eradicating poverty, improving health, artificial intelligence:

Either we,

1. become mathematicians, staticians or economicians (preferably Phd’s)

2. Develop generic career capital involving leadership (founding), management abilities (fundraising large sums of money within bureaucracies)

3. Get into policy making, shaping type of roles; Grant maker

4. Earning to give is always an option, but first we need to see what we can do directly.

80k hours, based on its research already is capable of suggesting what could be best career for you, given certain preferences and based how far you are in your career or not.

The Career quiz suggest me the following based on my answers:

• Management consulting
• Working at effective non-profits
• Product manager at Tech
• Data Science ( for skill-building & earning to give)
• Economics phd
• Software engineering at large tech-firms
• Machine learning phdg

1. TODO differntiate the jobs that can allow you to work directly

   Dig into which one of the above are purely for earning to give and what skill they can give in terms of career capital to take over the world. More things are missing, such as what exactly does it mean to work directly and what jobs come under that.

Felxible Career Capital

80k hrs is very clear in their advice that we should look for opportunities of direct impact rather than earning to give, to begin with.

People peak usually after 10 to 20 years of experience. Being successful takes time. Invest in your now for a better impact tomorrow.

For instance, learning marketing or management is flexible because almost all organisations need these skills; whereas becoming an expert on Kenyan microfinance is not. - 80k hours website on career capital

I read the story about Tara and constantly think that I am not that high acheiver, what ever Tara touches turns to gold. But thats ok, things take time, and I am going to be that acheiver. Let’s already start learning something.

If you’re really uncertain, then you could make flexible career capital your main focus. As you learn more, you can make your plan more and more targeted. (We’ll cover how to do this in a later article.)

Bear in mind, the advice “build flexible career capital” is not the same as “don’t close any doors”. Some people try to avoid committing to a specific path because they’re unsure what to do. *Rather, the advice is to commit to a path in which you’ll gain career capital that’s useful in many other paths. Just pick an area, perform highly, learn valuable skills, and meet influential people.* You’ll end up in a better position than if you try to do a bit of everything and don’t achieve anything.

This is one of the important pieces of advice without which I would just continue to mentally masturbate. It is hard to predict already what you can do in the future. It suggests to generically go for something that I am a personal fit in and kill at it! As long as I am in one of the fields they have talked about, I should be good? I guess. They have done the research.

Dont do a bit of everything! Mainly focus on:

• Working in any organisation which has, or with any people who have, a reputation for high performance e.g. top consultancy or technology firms, or any work with a great mentor or team.

• Undertaking certain graduate studies, especially applied quantitative subjects like economics, computer science and applied mathematics.

• Anything that gives you a valuable transferable skill e.g. programming, data

science, marketing.

• Taking opportunities which allow you to achieve

impressive and socially valuable things e.g. founding an organisation, doing anything at which you might excel.**** Work at a growing organisation that has a reputation for high performance

(The skill consulting/management seems to give you!)

Consulting works because the companies make you work hard, train you up, and put you around other productive people, building your skills and connections. These jobs are also widely recognised as competitive positions, which gives you a credential.*But there are many other positions that can provide similar benefits.*

1. comparing two options interms of Career Capital

   Skills

   what will you learn in this job, and how fast will you learn? You can break skills down into transferable skills, knowledge and personality traits. Some especially useful transferable skills include: personal productivity, analysis and problem-solving, the ability to learn quickly, decision-making, social skills, and management. We cover why and how to learn them in a later article. If you want to do good, you also need to learn all about the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them. A job will be best for learning when you are pushed to improve and get lots of feedback from mentors.

   The very best career capital comes from impressive achievements.

   Doing great work builds your reputation, and that allows you to make connections with other high achievers.

   If you want to make a big difference in the world, you need something valuable to contribute. Level up before you take on the big boss.

   Connections

   who will you work with and meet in this job? Your connections are how you’ll find opportunities, spread ideas and start new projects. The people you spend time with also shape your character. For both reasons, it’s important to make connections who are influential and who care about social impact.

   Credentials

   will this job act as a good signal to future collaborators or employers?

   Runway

   how much money will you save in this job?

   Gaining flexible and future-proof career capital

   Future proof:AI proof, that allows the ability to do other things based on interest and what is needed at the particular hour!

   In general, the more uncertain you are about the future and your career, the more important it is to gain career capital that’s flexible.

   Flexibility is more important at the start of the career as this is the point when you know the least about your career and what you want to do in the future and what you can do!

Planning

According to 80k hrs (career planning),

What should we do over the next 10 or 20 years? What is the right career for us?

These are hard questions to answer for the following reasons:

1. You’ll change more than you think

2. The world will change, many industries wont exist in the next 20 years

3. You’ll learn more about what is best for you, what you can do best (personal fit?). It’s hard to predict what you’re going to be good at ahead of time.

There is no single “Right career for you”

I have no idea what to do in the medium term even. I am just looking to either make huge money and gain career capital or just work directly. But right now I have no idea how to evaluate what I could be doing and if I could be doing that in 10 to 20 years. I think the easier and much more soothing-to-the-ear option, due to my uncertainity is to start off with buildng flexible career capital and figure it out on the way what is best for me.

As the 80k hours website says the idea of figuring out what career will work in the end for you is just like what the top people have to figure out while makeing a startup. We need 3 plans:

Plan A, one where we see a top option, a personal fit which we feel reasonably ok, in the medium term (5-10 years?). If we are uncertain or very uncertain we shall look at building flexible career capital

Plan B, promising nearby alternative

Plan Z, the fall back option in case not even one start aligns itself to work out for you!

Not a single thing I wrote in my 25 year plan was right. For me the Journey was not predictible at all. The world is changing. Only thing we can do is prepare. Things will change. - Tim Cook (Apple)

1. Summary

   So much english until now.

   In essence, we will not be able to predict what we can do . I think what we can do is prepare. Prepare as in, know what type of engineers the world needs, and then become one of them based on personal fit and career capital, and excel at it.

   For example, we could found companies that help people ( direct work). Definitely something to prep for. We could become top management officials/ management consultants who earn like hell and give it away ( earning to give). The thing I don’t know reliably is if things would work out the way I want. Hell I can’t even predict which of those will create the most impact mainly due to the million uncertainities inbetween. But I know I can start somewhere, in a “future proof” career trajectory, such that with some effort based on my later “better” understanding of my capabilites and the worlds necessities, I could just move to the place that needs me the most, where I can contribute the most. Note that such a career should be flexible, like a marketting job for example ( i.e., every company needs this).

   Flexible- useful in many different types of jobs, and likely to remain useful in the future. Such would be the type of job that we want to be in!

   First I wanted to summarize things, and now we proceed further with evaluating options by looking at career paths of certain people!

Narrowing down

How to narrow down or even begin narrowing down according to 80k hours?

What I might want to look like in 20 years?

David Goldberg started the “Founder’s forum for good”.

Before all that, I spent a couple years in finance (from a philosophy degree) in the US, started and sold a business in Europe, and ran a chain of Segway dealerships in California. - David Goldberg

Without a clear idea of what I want to do or what I could be doing, I see myself in the blind. I am really uncertain about what I could be doing, I don’t know if I should just choose something, or how to go about it.

In other words, when I want to compare things, I don’t understand what exactly to look for. What is good skill, what is good connection and for what is something a good connection etc…

So I want to roughly say, I want flexible career capital. By that I mean I should be able to jump to something bigger and better when the time arises. I see roughly a couple of ways this is going down.

3 Concrete ways I think I might actually contribute to society in the long run (estimated personal fit):

1. Earn to give in data science / Management consulting / programming

2. Working as a researcher at GiveWell, looking at data and determining which place needs funding and how effective they are.

3. Having the ability to found companies that can cause much bigger impact

4. Manage a business or start something that can make millions or is useful to a large number of people

Looking into possible options from a high level

Goal is to come up with better understanding comparing different options across parameters with solid arguments and some clear conclusion.

So the parameters are:

TODO Uncertinity in knowing how my current job fares in terms of learning and gaining career capital

TODO Is changing a job to another design engineering position of consultancy advisible!

1. Flexible-career-capital

   Something that is future proof and something that allows me to change to different types of jobs is the definition of career capital. For example, you don’t want to do something real specific, like know exactly how to train a komodo dragon of age 3. You need to be flexbile in the sense, have a wide scope to be useful in various scenarios and move as we have more information ( be able to train all dragons for example). We need to be able to build on our previous knowledge and not start afresh every single time. It’s time and skill we spent there. For example, Tara went on to be a pharmacist in the red cross. Despite realizing that she can do better elsewhere, she does not have the skills to move. This is what you want to avoid.

   With Design engineering in NL, I am not sure how transferable the skills learnt here are. Yes I work on problem solving in the precision industry. But I don’t know how I will fare in the automotive industry for example. Going to an engineering consultancy might help gain flexible career capital. As consultants typically work 1 year to 6 months in a field and move to another project.

   It might help me climb the stages say as a design leader and go into management or team leading, but I am not sure what the scene is. Specifically, I am not sure if it will make enough money as you get promotions. What I do is creative, and I suspect my job cannot be AI’d. If mine can be AIed, then data science should also be, but I don’t see any alarms caused there within the website.

   In summary, Engineering as I do seems AI unreplacable for now, I am not sure how to quantify or qualify the career capital obtained through this. Although I can say that with my current job, it feels like very little is going on somedays. Either change jobs to much more learning and better peers! Need to write a little about it, before I conclude. I am not here to complain.

   Data Science, Management, finance, marketting and programming is considered as flexible career capital as every company needs them and is and will be in great demand. hat will be relevant in many different jobs in the future as technology changes. This prevents you from getting stuck in a dead end, especially early in your career.

2. Skills that you gain:

3. Programming, statistics

4. Personal productivity, problem-solving

5. Decision making, social skills and management

Statistics and forms of data science and being good with numbers and problem solving seem to be part of finance, management consulting, programming and data science.

As things are slow at my job as a design engineer, although from time to time I do problem solving, I dont think I will end up with any proper acheivements or skills, so Moving is impoeritive.

1. Connections that you will make

I don’t really know much about this. Anyways, I have heard stories of management consultants knowing big people, also data scientists. My job, well, not much as I have here first hand.

1. Runway

   Hypothesis: Doing engineering will not get me crazy runway

   Evidence: This is the money that I will be able to save in case I get laid off or need to try something else. Also money I can give falls in this category. For the sake of convinience, we will just talk about money earned and money saved as our key indicators.

   My data science friend working in apple earns about 150k $ just by himself after 2 years of work + a killer masters, with madass bonusses. My brother an antenna design engineer in Nvidia, probably does something similar after 5 years of experience. My friend in somewhat a similar field as I (mechanical engineering; troubleshooting etc…) earns about 95k. All the above are in the same region.

Hypothesis: Working in Holland probably never gets any better

Evidence:As a hollander working for the last year, I suspect the way of work throughout is about 8 hrs/day and nothing more. Their whole lifestyle is relaxed. For example, I have 40 motherfucking days of paid vacation. The only case I have heard of life being fast paced, long-hours, crazy money ( like the US), is with investment banking. This makes sense, the job demands that. The normal folk people get paid not as much as US, get many holidays and get work 8 hrs and done. My colleague who is a very good electrical engineer gets paid a meer 52k Euros with 20 years of experience. My special “performance bonus” was 700 Euros. I can’t imagine someone with mech engineering in my company with similar years of experience, gets much more. The increase in salaries are at max 5% (translates to <500 Euros a years, i.e., 50 euros a month) Kill me! Although I am in a startup, this one is modestly funded. Maybe the situation is much better when I join say ASML a leading lithographer.

Talking about saving, my current saving with participating in limited sort of activities could be 14k euros. My saving could increase to ~22k euros conservatively saying. My peer in US can save about say 35k $ (28k Euros), 6k is nothing short of awesome. And I suspect his pay increases are more than that we have here, along with growth.

To me it looks like working in holland based on runway never gets better. But it is rather easy to get a citizenship. This would me for a great plan Z. I could try everything I want and fail and pick up myself in Holland.

Hypothesis: CS engineers, Data scientists, create more value for the company and hence get more money. These people also do a lot of problem solving.

1. Personal fit

   To me the easiest thing to move to would be DS, as it involves little programming and some problem solving. Traineeships are around the corner. I could prep for free online, or if I am cray, I could take a bootcamp in UK. Wow! Moving certainly would start from netherlands and slowly move to the US say after joining Google here.

   Management consultancy is right off the charts something that I am currently not cut out for. There was a Shell traineeship, which I felt I might not be suited for (read as “Hard”) right from the beginning ( well my worry is mainly about quantitative reasoning in break neck speeds.). I am young and thriving and I suspect I can pull my shit up and prep for it if thats what it takes, and go into some form of management after which I can migrate to a consultancy? Cause right now I am just an engineer. Mckinsey doesn’t want to hire this Nigga! I want to work my ass off in my prime and kill it. Learn a lot, be pushed beyond things. I suspect I can always pick up from where I left and get back to engineering if I suck.

   Investment banking could be the hardest, from a skillset point of view. Right now to get into it, I don’t know anyway, other than doing a proper degree. I don’t know how I’ll fare. I am ready to put in the hours and be good at it. It’s ok to fail. The money is crazy, I want a part of that. Maybe somehow get into finance of sorts and from there, move to other avenues. If not now when!

   Design engineering is pretty much what I can get into, I fit in pretty well. With some years of experience I should be quite good. Although with my current job, I am more like doing problem solving for the precision industry. Thinking of ways to come up with solutions is mostly what I do nowadays. I think I am slow, that things take a long while to get done, but I don’t hear that feedback from my leader yet.

2. Impact

will be based on career capital, Runway. Right now I am not looking at what will be the exact impact. I will take rough rules of thumb as prescribed by 80k hrs. The website already informed me that Management consultancy would be my best option to create impact.

This is what I want to be like, I would like to move to interesting and hard problems solve them. I want to be as good as possible with my job. Be an acheiver, just like the other souls interviewed by 80k-hours-website.

My career could look something like this…

Before all that, I spent a couple years in finance (from a philosophy degree) in the US, started and sold a business in Europe, and ran a chain of Segway dealerships in California.

The profiles of people on the website are nothing short of exceptional. That’s what I want to be, and hopefully that creates a lot of impact. Maximize success, be really good at what I do. Donate as much as possible and jump to opportunities to lead, With more time and more knowledge I should be able to choose and move up like the guy above.

1. how to get there? ability to get there, some career paths?

For Design Engineering, maybe there is a scope in the future to startup once I am very good with what I do, maybe become CTO material and then make good money, just like doing a business. But the probabilities of that happening are low, I feel if I stick to this job. I will become a Design leader but then there are several people in line I have to beat to get to that position within a company. I just want a role where I provide direction and allow people to work it out. I just want to push for change in the way I see fit. Even more rare is the company you startup actually going to be directly impactful. So my point is yeah, I am already there. To get to US, I could try to apply to US first and see, or move to some other bigger company like ASML, and move within the company after good performance over some years.

For Management Consulting I think I can get in, in 2 ways. Popular opinion on 80k-hours-website is that one has to be part of the Mckinsey, BCG and BAin. So assuming that I have to be there only, I could do

• MBA

• part-time MBA

• Management traineeship at shell followed by attempting to apply to Mckinsey with a killer profile.

For investment banking I could possibly do

• an economics masters in NL

• or do some basic courses and try to get an internship and see where that takes you, within a company.

For data science I see the following

• start a traineeship ( apply and get selected of course)

• join a company in a starting position in Netherlands.

• Learn enough DS online for 6 months and then look to appllying in the US

• Apply for a masters

For Programming I guess I would, start picking up programming skills and try to hit google nl in 2 years and from there try to move to the US. I am not really keen on doing programming but Data science is more something I am in for. DS has both problem solving and little data science. Something I can migrate to almost now.

For business I will see how my friend is faring with his startup in Holland and then maybe look for some options here. He told me has contacts, but nothing materialized. Anyways it still seems farfetched, that I would start running a huge company. I could run companies for people and become big like that, but what we are talking about seems far-fetched. I had several freinds saying in air that I could work with them, but in reality they themselves were struggling. I don’t see an opportunity that would allow me to gain experience and go on from there. I wouldn’t know what a career like that looks like. I don’t see options, and I don’t see any value in giving up my current job and trying something like this. A store manager I am not sure what it would constitute to in a resume to what all I want to become in the future. I want to make money, and shit loads of it. Get it, not be a store manger!

Going to Dubai for the money, could be a good plan A, but without planZ it is useless. I see all sorts of options opening up with an MBA.

Next week I will write more about specific ways I can do things, with the costs etc.. that it would take to actually do things like that. And the week after I think I should just go for decision making.

Meanwhile tomorrow I want to make sure I have written enough and produce some TODO’s. It’s going to be painful! right o right o

This would mean somehow build my profile in DS before applying or? just apply?

Making a big list of options.

Right now the problems I work would just allow me the ability to earn-to-give and allow me career capital with which I should be able to be bigger things.

Bigger things would look like this:

He started the “Founder’s forum for good”

Before all that, I spent a couple years in finance (from a philosophy degree) in the US, started and sold a business in Europe, and ran a chain of Segway dealerships in California.

Management, finance, marketting and sales seems to surely have its benifits

Design engineering/ Mechanical engineering in Netherlands

I suspect engineering does not have much scope for me either with earning-to-give or building-career-capital that is transferable and felxible (useful in many different jobs and future proof).

The first thing that the interviewer at ASML told me is that if I am looking at this job, then I am already aware that money is not going to be big. I suspect he was talking about the career growth etc… A job in Shell (Management traineeship) could go all the way to 100 k euros in 5 years within the same company. As an engineer, with the bonus that we usually get withing 5 years, I cannot expect that growth.

It appears that there are other careers in other regions that should allow me to earn much more than what I do now. I am young and thriving, ready for some crazy hard ass challenges, ready to work long hours if there is enough career capital on the plate.

1. Flexible-career-capital

I work in the precision industry as a design/mechanical engineer. Job is prmarily about problem solving and learning different things. Involves a lot of shit, like having to deal with low-level work. Lots of things bogging you down like shit, like having to deal with HDF5 files and looking at them manually, copying time stamps to determine where I need to be.

• Lots of low-level work needs to be done, way of work sucks to get to the cream of

problem solving.

• Way of work sucks, slow, and unmotivating for a decent part.

Although can’t rememeber feeling like I want to kill myself or feeling that I have to go to work. It seems natural. Challenges are in plenty.

• Still can be challenging.

• Skills that you gain,

Decent problem solving skills, but need to move through quite some low-level work. I am right now going into a clean room and doing clamps and taking pictures. Not sure if it gets better say in data science, where data always needs to be cleaned up.

1. Connections that you will make

Well nothing great except the CEO of the company. Colleagues are laid back, clock 7.5 hours on an 8 hr work day. Not good for morale. DL is really good, asks the right questions. This job might lead to a better job but well,

Probably not the best people to surround with as they are laid back, I guess because I am in R&D. These people are not going to help me spread ideas or are niether influential to help me out.

Some brainy people are here with whom I could collborate and work with.

Thats it for now. I

1. Runway

Money you will make

1. What people you know say?

2. Personal fit

3. Which plan would it be?

A/B/Z

1. Impact

will be based on career capital, Runway

1. Job demand

2. Ability to sport

3. Key uncertainities

4. how to get there? ability to get there, some career paths?

Design engineering in the US

Data Scientist

Programming/ Software engineer at google

Management consultancy @ Mckinsey

Investment banking with 100 mill

Finance

Business opportunities/ business management