80,000 Hours is a non-profit that researches the world’s most pressing problems and provides guidance on how to make an impact on them with your career. Apart from the whole “saving the world” focus, what I love about their basic premise is that your career matters.
Not only does it matter to you, who will be the one living it out every day and week and month for approximately 80,000 hours, but it matters to the world what you do. The world will be affected by our existence. We can choose how we effect it - did we make some company money serving ads, or did we meaningfully contribute to improving wellbeing in our world?
All this to say, it’s important that each of us spend a lot of time thinking about who and what we’re working for. This thought process prominently plays out during the interview process, when we actually have to decide between competing priorities. How much do we care about impact, culture, money, balance, benefits, and location? These decisions get made by and for us during the interview process.
Why RC is the best place to go through an interview process:
- Access to a full-time support staff with your best interests in mind and connections to many awesome partner companies
- Time allocation is super flexible
- A large peer community that is going through similar stresses and thought processes about employment
- 24/7 sound-proof rooms to have phone/video calls
Why RC is the worst place to go through an interview process:
- INTERVIEW PROCESSES CUT IN TO THE 12 SHORT WEEKS AVAILABLE TO LEARN COOL AND INTERESTING THINGS!!!
All this to say that I spent much of last week preparing for interviews and doing interviews. This took precedence over project 6 of Nand2Tetris and various other projects I had on the go.
Luckily, I was able to learn much about bitwise puzzles and concurrency in Python while studying for interviews.