Job Postings?
I often come across job postings that require a skill set—math, statistics, programming, etc—that might make them ideal for some LW readers. Since finding fun jobs for LWers seems like a good thing to do, I often think I should post these job profiles to the discussion section.
But nobody else has done this, and it seems like the kind of thing that people might get annoyed about. Certainly we don’t want LW to be overrun with recruiters.
Any thoughts?
I think few would be bothered by a “cool job offers” thread. People activley seeking them or open to the idea of doing something new would probably check that one thread pretty dilligently, as long as people knew it existed.
It also seems very likley posts in the thread that people would find interesting would be appropriatley up voted.
Maybe a monthly job-posting discussion thread, where jobs are top-level comments?
You might be interested in the risk reduction network, which I get the impression is somewhat broader and narrower than the LW audience.
This seems like the best option for right now, but in the future I hope LW will get a good tagging and filtering interface so that these kinds of things will be postable to LW.
Agree.
Usually those descriptors are opposites. What do you mean?
Broader in that in includes people not interested in LW, and narrower in that it does not include everyone interested in LW. Compare to longer and thinner, except with those words it’s clear the dimensions are orthogonal (which I didn’t think was a good fit for describing the differing dimensions of the xrisk network).
I personally would enjoy such a thread.
My 2 cents:
(1) at any given time, only a small fraction of LWers is looking for a job.
(2) there already exist a robust set of services to inform job seekers of available jobs.
And yet many employee-seekers are unable to satisfy their demands for workers. There is a signal-to-noise problem here. Still, I don’t think LW is a proper forum for this sort of thing just yet. It’s too non-localized as compared to how employment operates, by necessity.
What’s the most LW-rational approach to job-hunting?
Well, what’s the most LW-rational approach to solving any problem? Define it, apply your known methodologies and ethics to discerning what you believe to be the optimal outcomes, and then engage in habits and practices which will be likely to produce that outcome.
In my case that meant investigating what skills I could conceivably acquire that would be emotionally satisfying to practice professionally—specifically of those that were in-demand. I did this by perusing job-listing forums of multiple types and further discussing with workers in said fields. I then sought out professionals in said career and asked them how they achieved their individual success, and attempted to model from that, general practices, and my knowledge of human cognition how to make that work for myself. That generally involved finding forums specifically dedicated to my type of job and of course listing myself in as many of those as possible, keeping the status updated (not neglecting “human networks” aka ‘networking’) -- and also placing myself with staffing firms that I had negotiated a position with.
There’s a lot of jargon in that, though, and it’s hard to go from abstract to practical. Basically I got myself skilled and certified with Linux because I love working w/ computers, talked to long-time sysadmins about how they got their jobs, and accepted lower-end work initially because it got me into ‘the industry’. I then put myself on forums like Dice.com and LinkedIn, and ‘signed up’ with about ten different staffing firms. After that it was just a matter of keeping the pressure on each of these while mitigating my costs to be within the means of what I could afford.
There is some precendence