Canadian Women Are Waiting For You - raganwald's posterous

The world of online dating is full of horror, pathos, frustration, and the occasional happy ending. If we were to judge love and relationships solely from online dating, we?d probably run screaming from the idea of trying to find a life partner.

Yet, the world is full of happy people in stable relationships. Most people out on dates are actually enjoying themselves. There is a huge discrepancy between the world of online dating and the world of love and relationships. Clearly, online dating is not representative of dating in general.

Why is that? And more importantly, does this tell us anything about finding satisfying work as a software developer?

If that was all there was to it, online dating wouldn?t be so hard. What makes it hard is the same thing that makes finding a job hard (and as Joel Spolsky pointed out,?it?s no easier for employers). Real life is considerably more complicated than this, but let?s work with a very simple idea: Given a marketplace of monogamous, single people, let?s assume that although some people are a better fit with each other than others, there is some overall reasonably straightforward measure of ?fitness for dating.?

And so we don?t start arguing about whether this has to do with being overweight or liking the wrong music, let?s be generous and simply say that we have some sort of cutoff, where people with serious, soul-crushing flaws are ?unfit,? and everyone else is ?fit.? For example, people who are married but lie and say they?re separated are unfit to date.

Let?s assume that 99/100 people who register with an online dating service are ?fit.? Maybe some more fit than others in your eyes, but they aren?t the bottom 1% of the barrel. So, here?s the tricky math question: If you search for whatever characteristics you find appealing on a dating web site, and your search turns up 100 people, how many will be unfit to date?

If you said 1/100 people, you are obviously very fortunate and have never used an online dating web site. The answer is more likely to be that 99/100 available people are unfit to date. William Thomas Fredrick! How can it be that although 99/100 registered users are fit to date, 99/100 available users are unfit to date? The answer lies in the word?available.

Let?s imagine for a moment that 99/100 available people were fit to date. What would happen? Well, there would be a lot of emailing back and forth, some dating, some shuffling, and 98/100 people would pair up and take their profiles down, leaving one fit but unlucky person and one unfit person. Both stay online, the unfit person has no choice, while the fit person will wait for better times.

Another 100 people register, 99 fit and one more unfit. Now there are 100 fit people, and they pair up, leaving two unfit people on the site. Another 100 people register and after pairing up, there?s a third unfit available person on the site. This continues pretty much indefinitely, until the site is choked with unfit people. The basic problem is that no matter how rare unfit people are in the general population, they are over-represented in the subset of available people. Fundamentally, the more desirable the person, the less time they spend being available, and therefore the rarer they are. This is true in general, but by reducing the friction of meeting people, online dating actually magnifies the effect.

So, if 99/100 available people are unfit to date, does that mean online dating doesn?t work? No. As noted above, it just means that finding available people is no longer an issue, the key to success is?filtering?the available people to find the few that are fit so you can date them and discover whether there?s a good fit for you.

Summary: The proportion of people unfit to date to those fit to date is high in online dating because those fit to date are only on the market for very short periods of time, while those who are unfit to date remain available indefinitely. This changes the problem from finding available people to filtering available people.

The problem with job hunting

Just like with online dating, the problem is that not all jobs are equal, and the best jobs are only ?on the market? for a short time: If an employer has a good job working with good people on an interesting problem for decent pay, all the good people line up to get that job and it?s very quickly filled.

Meanwhile, the companies with the worst jobs are constantly hiring. Either nobody wants that job for that salary with that company reporting to that manager, or somebody takes the job but quits soon thereafter and the same job is ?back on the market.? The result is the same as with online dating, terrible jobs are ?over-represented? in the marketplace.

(It?s actually a much more complex situation, because good companies often expand, meaning that they create new job openings, so looking for jobs with good companies might be like online dating in a polygamous culture, but having?made the basic point?with the online dating metaphor, let?s drop it and move along.)

The key insight from our simplified online dating discussion was that by eliminating the friction involved in finding available people, the problem changed from finding available people to filtering the available people you find to eliminate the incredibly large proportion of available people who are entirely unfit.

So what does this mean for finding a job? I think it means that you have to change your mindset from finding a job to one of filtering available jobs. A lot of conventional wisdom about job hunting is written with the assumption that if you?re in an interview, the odds are good that it?s a decent job, and that your job is to sell them on yourself and negotiate the best compensation possible.

Even if you?re fresh out of school, I think you need to reject this unspoken assumption and take the perspective that if you go on ten interviews, nine of the jobs will not be worth having. It?s your job to discover which of the ten is ?fit? to employ you. That doesn?t mean you need to be arrogant: The person interviewing you is agonizing over the fact that 99/100 job applicants are unfit to work there, so have a little empathy for them when they ask you some nano-questions or they want you to write?FizzBuzz.

The tricky thing about filtering employers is that the act of asking them questions can put them off. It?s unfair and unreasonable, but many of them get defensive at the very thought that you might not consider working for them a privilege bequeathed only upon the most worthy. It?s considered good interviewing style to ask you ?Tell me about a time you had a disagreement with your manager and how you handled it,? but it requires tact and finesse to ask a hiring manager ?Tell me about a time you had a disagreement with a star programmer and how you handled it.?

Likewise, although every good manager will ask you to explain why you left your last three jobs, it?s not always possible to ask him to explain the reasons why the last three people who left his company chose to quit.

So what do you do? Well, I say if you want to ask a question but you can?t ask Alice, go ask Bob. And if Bob doesn?t know the answer, try Charlene. In the case of choosing an employer, if you want to know something and you aren?t comfortable asking the hiring manager, do some research. Find other people who work or worked at the company and ask them. Put together an anonymous account and ask questions on the Internet. Use?DuckDuckGo.

In a word,?Research?the company. Is this really a place you want to work? Don?t assume that it is, I think that assumption may have been good in 1972, but it?s badly broken in 2012.

Summary

This little essay really boils down to one simple idea and one simple consequence of that idea. The idea is that because of the dynamics of a marketplace where most employers with open jobs on the job market are unfit to employ you, and the consequence is that you have to change your mindset from ?finding? a job to ?filtering the good jobs from the dreck.? Because of certain cultural assumptions about the kinds of questions you?re not expected to ask in an interview, you should take the initiative and research, research, research employers before even considering an offer.

Source: http://raganwald.posterous.com/canadian-women-are-waiting-for-you

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