Do you have any thoughts on what this principle would look like when applied to the problem of unemployment?
To vaguely gesture at the kind of thing I’m imagining: “You don’t need a perfect resume to start taking steps towards landing a job you’ll like. You can just do X, which will bring you in contact with people in that field, and if you then do Y… which leads to Z...”
To put a more concrete framing around it, do you think it would be possible for someone so inclined to write a set of instructions (e.g. in a blog post) that:
if followed, would lead to employment in > 80% of cases in < 100 days
were simple enough that most healthy adults could understand and execute them if they wanted?
(You can adjust the numbers and other specifics if you like.)
For this thought experiment, entrepreneurship, self-employment, gigs, etc. count as employment if the income exceeds, or is on a trajectory to exceed, unemployment benefits.
This problem has been on my mind a lot lately, with unemployment rates persistently high and still rising in Finland. I’m fortunate in that I’ve not been personally affected (and feel confident I could find a new job if it came to that), but the whole situation is just a colossal waste.
I think the stable list of instructions that you desire does not exist because your country’s economy is limited by something that is not human capital. Since there are more job seekers than open positions within your country’s economy, the job market is zero sum and any advice will inevitably become less useful as it spread. This zero-sumness makes a stable list of instructions the average person could follow to get a job impossible.
For there to be no stable list of instructions, there must be empirical evidence in favor of a zero sum job market, something that emerges during a labor surplus. I believe the unemployment rate is explanatory because high unemployment is strong evidence for a large amount of unused human capital. An unskilled labor shortage is incompatible with a high unemployment rate since the unemployed would rapidly be hired until full employment is achieved. If instead, a skilled labor shortage was the issue, Finland’s companies (or its government) would use some of their profits to create successful training programs that turn the average unemployed person into skilled workers. This would cause unemployment to fall. To my knowledge, neither of these things is happening in Finland. Therefore, Finland has a labor surplus, rendering the job market zero sum. And with a zero sum job market, the main effect of spreading effective advice about how to get a job is that the effort required to find a job increases.
As for the existence of an unstable set of instructions the average person in Western countries could follow to get a job, I don’t know if such a list exists due to how good advice similar to what XelaP has provided has spread. The amount of effort required to find a job might be beyond what an average person is consistently capable of, especially if one lacks the necessary personal connections. The only advice I have that could be useful to give is this: should you become unemployed, look for organizations that are genuinely hiring and apply there instead of wasting time with organizations that are pretending to hire to signal something to someone.
I certainly agree that one of the many effects would be increased competition for existing job opportunities. But wouldn’t more effective job-seeking also result in a more effective allocation of labour? And since capital can be reallocated, both within the country and across borders, wouldn’t this in principle unlock the possibility of full employment?
I think that the skillset required to quickly get hired does not necessarily overlap with the set of skills required to be an effective worker when on the job. Furthermore, I think one’s ability to learn how to find a job may not correlate particularly well with one’s ability to perform while on the job. As a result, I believe that in an environment where the job search is intense, the people who get hired might not be the people who should be hired if your goal was to more effectively allocate labor.
Still, if “getting hired quickly” and “will do a good job” are strongly correlated, then a more competitive hiring process will lead to a more efficient allocation of labor, leading to a stronger economy. I don’t think this would full employment unless the gains created by more efficiently allocating labor are large. If these conditions are empirically met, then we agree that more effective job seeking could in principle lead to full employment.
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 think we have vastly different models of employment and economics. If everyone trained a skill (like carpentry or electricianing) or applied creativity to their life problems, I expect GDP to go up (proportional to how much change happened) and with it employment and standard of living. If I could magically get every Fin to suddenly start living their life that way I expect that you’d be able to see it in the econimic statistics.
Do you have any thoughts on what this principle would look like when applied to the problem of unemployment?
To vaguely gesture at the kind of thing I’m imagining: “You don’t need a perfect resume to start taking steps towards landing a job you’ll like. You can just do X, which will bring you in contact with people in that field, and if you then do Y… which leads to Z...”
To put a more concrete framing around it, do you think it would be possible for someone so inclined to write a set of instructions (e.g. in a blog post) that:
if followed, would lead to employment in > 80% of cases in < 100 days
were simple enough that most healthy adults could understand and execute them if they wanted?
(You can adjust the numbers and other specifics if you like.)
For this thought experiment, entrepreneurship, self-employment, gigs, etc. count as employment if the income exceeds, or is on a trajectory to exceed, unemployment benefits.
This problem has been on my mind a lot lately, with unemployment rates persistently high and still rising in Finland. I’m fortunate in that I’ve not been personally affected (and feel confident I could find a new job if it came to that), but the whole situation is just a colossal waste.
I think the stable list of instructions that you desire does not exist because your country’s economy is limited by something that is not human capital. Since there are more job seekers than open positions within your country’s economy, the job market is zero sum and any advice will inevitably become less useful as it spread. This zero-sumness makes a stable list of instructions the average person could follow to get a job impossible.
For there to be no stable list of instructions, there must be empirical evidence in favor of a zero sum job market, something that emerges during a labor surplus. I believe the unemployment rate is explanatory because high unemployment is strong evidence for a large amount of unused human capital. An unskilled labor shortage is incompatible with a high unemployment rate since the unemployed would rapidly be hired until full employment is achieved. If instead, a skilled labor shortage was the issue, Finland’s companies (or its government) would use some of their profits to create successful training programs that turn the average unemployed person into skilled workers. This would cause unemployment to fall. To my knowledge, neither of these things is happening in Finland. Therefore, Finland has a labor surplus, rendering the job market zero sum. And with a zero sum job market, the main effect of spreading effective advice about how to get a job is that the effort required to find a job increases.
As for the existence of an unstable set of instructions the average person in Western countries could follow to get a job, I don’t know if such a list exists due to how good advice similar to what XelaP has provided has spread. The amount of effort required to find a job might be beyond what an average person is consistently capable of, especially if one lacks the necessary personal connections. The only advice I have that could be useful to give is this: should you become unemployed, look for organizations that are genuinely hiring and apply there instead of wasting time with organizations that are pretending to hire to signal something to someone.
I certainly agree that one of the many effects would be increased competition for existing job opportunities. But wouldn’t more effective job-seeking also result in a more effective allocation of labour? And since capital can be reallocated, both within the country and across borders, wouldn’t this in principle unlock the possibility of full employment?
I think that the skillset required to quickly get hired does not necessarily overlap with the set of skills required to be an effective worker when on the job. Furthermore, I think one’s ability to learn how to find a job may not correlate particularly well with one’s ability to perform while on the job. As a result, I believe that in an environment where the job search is intense, the people who get hired might not be the people who should be hired if your goal was to more effectively allocate labor.
Still, if “getting hired quickly” and “will do a good job” are strongly correlated, then a more competitive hiring process will lead to a more efficient allocation of labor, leading to a stronger economy. I don’t think this would full employment unless the gains created by more efficiently allocating labor are large. If these conditions are empirically met, then we agree that more effective job seeking could in principle lead to full employment.
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.)
I think we have vastly different models of employment and economics. If everyone trained a skill (like carpentry or electricianing) or applied creativity to their life problems, I expect GDP to go up (proportional to how much change happened) and with it employment and standard of living. If I could magically get every Fin to suddenly start living their life that way I expect that you’d be able to see it in the econimic statistics.