How Long Should you Take to Decide on a Career?

According to a recent survey from Rethink Priorities, when asked what best describes their current career respondents replied:

I was struck how perfectly this aligns with the optimal solution to the Secretary Problem: given N options, and subject to certain constraints, you should evaluate 37% of them before committing (those two survey responses add up to 35.6%). This is mostly coincidental, but leads to a longer exploration of real-life applications of SP-like dynamics.

Of course, SP is just a toy model. For our use, the two most problematic assumptions are Binary Payoff: the evaluator’s goal is merely to maximize their probability of selecting the best candidate, meaning 2nd best is just as bad as the worst, and No Opportunity Cost: evaluation is treated as free, there’s no cost to making a selection after 100 seeing candidates rather than after 10. I refer to an adjusted SP without these assumptions as the Modified Secretary Problem (MSP).

See also from Robert Wiblin, How replaceable are the top candidates in large hiring rounds? and Analysis of heuristic solutions to the best choice problem (Stein, Seale and Rapoport, 2003) and EA Survey 2020: Demographics and Chapter 1 of Algorithms to Live By.

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