I’ll admit that I’ve never had a job aside from like, tutoring at a school that I was a student of. Secondly I have no instructions that most healthy adults would actually (in an intent to treat sense) find turn them into employees with houses and stable finances. “If they wanted” is doing a bunch of legwork here—what counts? If you actually follow the instructions, there are loads of things you could do—I really think way more people could learn to code up to a basic ability if they actually worked on it for a couple hours every day. I understand not doing this—I myself have pretty bad problems with doing any unpleasant cognitive task.
Regardless, these principles suggest some more unusual advice, some which I think a normal person could hear a friend tell them, follow, and then get good results. Not like magic results, but good.
Unfortunately I think the main skill being used here is “summon creative problem solving”. I think ordinary people can do this: If you can brainstorm what Light Yagamishould do next or whether Batman could guide a tortoise across the U.S. during a zombie apocalypse, then what’s stopping you from brainstorming what John Smith should do next given that he has prep time, is ‘joblusted’, has X preexisting abilities and Y debuffs, etc.
Anyways, here’s my list. If I end up needing a job and not trying to play to my unusual domain abilities (e.g. if that just doesn’t pan out) this is some of what I’d hope to do:
Cold email people with your resume or an adapted version of it explaining why you’re a good fit. I’ve heard people succeed by doing this but idk how generalizable this strategy is. Possibly this stopped working after LLM led to much more spam everywhere.
Cold talk to people in your network.
Tell people you know that you want a job in X and have Y skills, in case they forward you along to some girlfriend’s uncle’s daughter.
Make a list of common skilled careers, apply some prioritization criteria like “some of these are easier to get a job with only the skill but not a credential” or “some of these are easier to get quick credentials after the fact”, try them out and see how fast you pick them up. Specifics: programming, electricianing, plumbing, carpentry, construction work, car maintenance, basic nurse skills, emt skills. If you need help writing the list try things like indeed + LLMs.
Factor out subskills of the above stuff and attack those.
Make a list of convergent general skills and try the above but for them. Specifics: touch typing, writing in the prestige dialect of wherever you are, learning English (yes yes I know, but famous hacker (his software is iirc probably running on my laptop?) Eric S. Raymond once said non-native speakers also say you should really do this), getting even gooder at English (speed + accent + colloquialisms?), being able to do algebra, financial literacy, how to drive a car (more useful in America), computer literacy (do you know what a file is? can you convert a png to a jpg? can you take a screenshot? search for all emails from Bob?), how to learn (I’d say “try reading textbooks, which you can get for free either from professor websites or illegally through means I would totally never endorse like Anna’s Archive, or just a library” but some people benefit more from video lectures, or following the schedule and content of e.g. MIT’s open courses. More unusual recc is Anki or other spaced repetition software (this link is a much more memorable but much less informative explainer)
Thanks, that’s a great list. Honestly, even just using Claude as a sparring partner to work through those points would probably be a major level-up for the average job search.
I’ll admit that I’ve never had a job aside from like, tutoring at a school that I was a student of. Secondly I have no instructions that most healthy adults would actually (in an intent to treat sense) find turn them into employees with houses and stable finances. “If they wanted” is doing a bunch of legwork here—what counts? If you actually follow the instructions, there are loads of things you could do—I really think way more people could learn to code up to a basic ability if they actually worked on it for a couple hours every day. I understand not doing this—I myself have pretty bad problems with doing any unpleasant cognitive task.
Regardless, these principles suggest some more unusual advice, some which I think a normal person could hear a friend tell them, follow, and then get good results. Not like magic results, but good.
Unfortunately I think the main skill being used here is “summon creative problem solving”. I think ordinary people can do this: If you can brainstorm what Light Yagami should do next or whether Batman could guide a tortoise across the U.S. during a zombie apocalypse, then what’s stopping you from brainstorming what John Smith should do next given that he has prep time, is ‘joblusted’, has X preexisting abilities and Y debuffs, etc.
Anyways, here’s my list. If I end up needing a job and not trying to play to my unusual domain abilities (e.g. if that just doesn’t pan out) this is some of what I’d hope to do:
Cold email people with your resume or an adapted version of it explaining why you’re a good fit. I’ve heard people succeed by doing this but idk how generalizable this strategy is. Possibly this stopped working after LLM led to much more spam everywhere.
Cold talk to people in your network.
Tell people you know that you want a job in X and have Y skills, in case they forward you along to some girlfriend’s uncle’s daughter.
Make a list of common skilled careers, apply some prioritization criteria like “some of these are easier to get a job with only the skill but not a credential” or “some of these are easier to get quick credentials after the fact”, try them out and see how fast you pick them up. Specifics: programming, electricianing, plumbing, carpentry, construction work, car maintenance, basic nurse skills, emt skills. If you need help writing the list try things like indeed + LLMs.
Factor out subskills of the above stuff and attack those.
Make a list of convergent general skills and try the above but for them. Specifics: touch typing, writing in the prestige dialect of wherever you are, learning English (yes yes I know, but famous hacker (his software is iirc probably running on my laptop?) Eric S. Raymond once said non-native speakers also say you should really do this), getting even gooder at English (speed + accent + colloquialisms?), being able to do algebra, financial literacy, how to drive a car (more useful in America), computer literacy (do you know what a file is? can you convert a png to a jpg? can you take a screenshot? search for all emails from Bob?), how to learn (I’d say “try reading textbooks, which you can get for free either from professor websites or illegally through means I would totally never endorse like Anna’s Archive, or just a library” but some people benefit more from video lectures, or following the schedule and content of e.g. MIT’s open courses. More unusual recc is Anki or other spaced repetition software (this link is a much more memorable but much less informative explainer)
Thanks, that’s a great list. Honestly, even just using Claude as a sparring partner to work through those points would probably be a major level-up for the average job search.
I like this framing and will try it on myself. (Not for job search currently but for other things.)