Before working in operations, I was a nanny for many years. Before that I was doing research while in grad school. I’ve always been bemused by the differences between the way people perceive and treat me in my various roles over the years.
Particularly, operations jobs (and childcare jobs) are possibly not a great idea for people whose identity is strongly centered around being (perceived as) intelligent:
Most of your work isn’t the sort of work that proves how smart you are. Coworkers expectations of your intelligence will be much lower. The skills you need run towards conscientiousness and agreeableness, which are traits that people stereotype as correlated with lower intelligence. Because your tasks are so wide ranging, there will always be things you are brand new at, therefore less competent at.
I’ve pushed my identity over the years more into being “a responsible hard worker”, so that people’s opinions of my intelligence don’t feel meaningful at all. Given that I feel the need to have SOME sort of identity, this seems like a more useful one. Identifying as “smart” can’t do anything to change my underlying g factor. But identifying as responsible and hard working is likely to actually make me behave in those ways.
I’m mostly bringing this up because LW readers often highly value being regarded as intelligent, and it might be a thing to take stock of before aiming for a new career in operations.
This is, unfortunately, kind of true in practice. (Although, ideally, is and will become a bit less true at major EA orgs—CEA was pretty good on this dimension and I never felt like people saw me as less intelligent, although that could be because it’s less a part of my identity so I didn’t notice).
I do think that ops work, especially the finance & accounting aspects, is pretty G-loaded, and that people wrongly perceive this as not the case. Anyway, I hope to discuss all of this more in a later post about the personal fit aspect.
Random thought:
Before working in operations, I was a nanny for many years. Before that I was doing research while in grad school. I’ve always been bemused by the differences between the way people perceive and treat me in my various roles over the years.
Particularly, operations jobs (and childcare jobs) are possibly not a great idea for people whose identity is strongly centered around being (perceived as) intelligent:
Most of your work isn’t the sort of work that proves how smart you are. Coworkers expectations of your intelligence will be much lower. The skills you need run towards conscientiousness and agreeableness, which are traits that people stereotype as correlated with lower intelligence. Because your tasks are so wide ranging, there will always be things you are brand new at, therefore less competent at.
I’ve pushed my identity over the years more into being “a responsible hard worker”, so that people’s opinions of my intelligence don’t feel meaningful at all. Given that I feel the need to have SOME sort of identity, this seems like a more useful one. Identifying as “smart” can’t do anything to change my underlying g factor. But identifying as responsible and hard working is likely to actually make me behave in those ways.
I’m mostly bringing this up because LW readers often highly value being regarded as intelligent, and it might be a thing to take stock of before aiming for a new career in operations.
This is, unfortunately, kind of true in practice. (Although, ideally, is and will become a bit less true at major EA orgs—CEA was pretty good on this dimension and I never felt like people saw me as less intelligent, although that could be because it’s less a part of my identity so I didn’t notice).
I do think that ops work, especially the finance & accounting aspects, is pretty G-loaded, and that people wrongly perceive this as not the case. Anyway, I hope to discuss all of this more in a later post about the personal fit aspect.