We reviewed over 60 studies about what makes for a dream job | Hacker News Reader

We reviewed over 60 studies about what makes for a dream job

80000hours.org

62 pointstfang1731 comments

I'm one of the authors of this piece, which was produced by a YC-backed non-profit trying to revolutionise careers advice (80,000 Hours). AMA!

I think this is an important area of research and it's great to see you trying to summarize the research in a digestible manner for people to apply but my impression from this article and other material I've read is that there's still a lot more work to do to tease out correlation and causation and translate the research into actionable advice.

For example, assuming that 'Work that helps others' is actually causative (and not that happier people tend to choose that work), what are the identifying characteristics of that type of work? What makes midwifery (from the article) more satisfying than say serving in a restaurant? Both appear to help others. Is it the magnitude of the help? The degree of personal engagement?

How can someone better identify 'Work you're good at'? Again, assuming it is causative (and not that happier people rate their own competency higher), how can someone effectively identify their comparative advantage? Presumably for career choice there is a strong effect of demand vs. supply in skills - I can be 'good' at snowboarding by most people's standards but have no chance of making a career at it. The advice on its own is not very actionable.

The article makes a common conflation of high achieving individuals with work satisfaction and yet the two do not necessarily match up (do we know that Steve Jobs and Einstein were more satisfied with their lives than average?) and these two examples from the article seem to not fit the 'Work that's engaging' criteria of 'Clear tasks, with a clearly defined start and end.' or 'Feedback, so you know how well you’re doing.', at least in the short to medium term.

Like I say, I think this type of research is valuable but I find little that is clearly actionable in my own life, with the exception of simple things like 'avoid long commutes' and from elsewhere in the happiness literature 'spend on experiences rather than things'.

I'm the lead author of the piece and I agree there's a lot more work to do on these issues. That's why we set up 80,000 Hours.

We address one of your questions in a later article: how to work out what you're good at https://80000hours.org/career-guide/personal-fit/ (And beyond this, you need to make predictions - I think the book superforecasters is good on what to do there)

In your research, did you come across any longer time frame happiness studies with respect to income?

I'm specifically thinking of myself (and probably a number of other people here) who tend to throw "extra" income past a certain point into retirement. Would be curious as to how that affects happiness after reaching the age of retirement. (Apologies if in article, still finishing)

Hey Ethbro, I read dozens of studies on income and happiness. What I found is summarised here: https://80000hours.org/articles/money-and-happiness/.

Some took a longer term view, in particular the ones on lottery winners.

Saving for retirement is obviously sensible. But I think the result will be the same - you won't be much happier retiring on $120,000 a year than $60,000 a year. What will matter at that point is having social connections and feeling that your work is/was meaningful.

I'm always impressed by attempts to empirically answer questions which typically receive less rigorous research, and the log-relationship and plateau of income vs happiness both bear out my personal experience.

However, I specifically asked about retirement because it shares some interesting characteristics with your supported findings.

A) Retirement accounts are intangible. I may receive pleasure and happiness from imagining the money I have in them, but believe it would be a hard case to make that I received true happiness from increasing them

B) Enabling retirement would seem to dovetail with the plateau effect. To wit, if I make $40k now, but am unable to save enough to make $40k in retirement, my happiness would plummet if I ever retired. If I make $60k now and save enough to provide $40k worth of retirement income, then my happiness would be substantially improved. Therefore that +$20k has a secondary effect of making me much happier later in life

I doubt it would change the findings, but if true, might shift the numbers a bit.

Hey Ethbro, it's a good point that maybe retirement saving isn't fully dealt with in our article. I'll add a sentence about that tomorrow. Basically I would just aim to stay about $40-60k both while you're working and in retirement. So it's more a consumption target than income target. :)

Consumption target seems a perfect way to think about it and elegantly sums up the implications! :)

I reworded the bit on retirement to help deal with this.

was the work of Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers part of the 60 studies you analyzed? they give pretty compelling evidence that the Easterlin paradox is not well-founded [0]. this seems to contradict your points claiming that money != happiness.

[0] http://www.nber.org/papers/w18992

I spent weeks doing a full review of the literature which is outlined in detail here: https://80000hours.org/articles/money-and-happiness/. I largely agree with Stevenson and Wolfers and this article does too. One of their co-authors on this research endorsed our bottom line.

Money does make you a bit happier, but most readers of HN are among the top 5% of income earners in the world, so it's not the top priority for them, on the margin. You can get more mileage by focussing on other things. I also think affective measures of welfare are more reliable than evaluative ones. But it's a huge issue that I had to write many thousands of words to cover properly, so check out the full article and see what you think.

ObXKCD: http://xkcd.com/1346/

I applied for 80k hours for a front-end job (first time I've really applied for a job). Didn't get it but now I see this:

> http://i.imgur.com/2988oNg.png

Don't blame the tech guy - I'm a writer and I set that up suddenly when I saw we were getting traffic from HN. Our coder would have done a vastly better job but it's 3am where he is! :)

OK I think I've fixed this now!

Great. Now that I see the full thing, I am using an ad-blocker as you can see in the screenshot (fully loaded and "max security"). However it doesn't hide the pop-up by default. If you actually want to allow for that, maybe you should add the class advertising, ads or similar (:

You have to take such studies with a grain of salt.

The most important one that put hacker news on the map was "Working for yourself" is missing from the list. Paul graham in the early days of hacker news wrote great things about miracles happening when people worked for themselves in small teams.

That kind of philosopher leadership has been missing in tech community as a whole. Look at comments and topics discussed on hacker news. These aspiring engineers are talking about how some one else should pay them basic income so they could innovate and many other lame excuses. very sad.

You've taken the thread off-topic in a rather trolling way (unintentionally, I'm sure, but that's how most trolling works nowadays). And I'm pretty sure your reading of HN is wrong. The vast majority here talk about basic income because they find the question interesting, not because they want it for themselves.

I'm a fan of http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html, too, but I wouldn't say it was what put HN on the map. It was one of many essays pg wrote, and IIRC it got a controversial reception at the time.

I think people are talking about how there should be basic income so they can innovate freely without having to fear decimating the economic lives of others.

I'm fine. I'd like to pay everyone else basic income so we can finally rid ourselves of the absolutely ridiculous state of poverty and hunger in a country of absolute plenty.

That, and no fear of becoming financially ruined by choosing to be a stay-at-home-mom, or needing to care for an ailing relative more than part-time, or any other emergency that might separate you from employment and healthcare and screw you financially for life.

What I find sad is anyone that thinks people in a lower class than themselves are "takers" or that poverty is a deserved result of some arbitrary moral line - or that anyone in 2016 should be homeless or hungry.

Working for yourself will often be fulfilling, because it can provide many of the six things we list that matter:

* Work you’re good at * Work that helps others * Engaging work that lets you enter a state of flow (freedom, variety, clear tasks, feedback) * Supportive colleagues * A job that meets your basic needs, like fair pay, short commute and reasonable hours * A job that fits your personal life.

Disagree. Working for yourself would provide none of these but allows you to create all/many of these out of your sheer will. These things are not a pre-condition.

I believe robertwiblin et al.'s point is that ceteris paribus working for yourself that features these characteristics will make you happier than working for yourself and focusing on other things.

In the original article, they clearly identify that some things (e.g. competence) can change over the course of a career. Hence "pre-condition" is a strange way to look at the research.

It doesn't necessarily provide those things certainly. But inasmuch as it makes people fulfilled, it will mostly be because working for yourself is providing those things. :)

or there is a simpler explanation. Those 60 studies made assumptions about what a job is and that definition would have excluded working for yourself.

The study would still make perfect sense if you look at job as an employment working for some other employer.

Findings unsurprising, and a rather annoying, popup-in-your-face website.

This is a classically bad comment to post to Hacker News. Shallow, hand-waving dismissals of new work are basically peeing in the swimming pool (in full public view, no less), making this thread a worse place and this community a worse place for everyone.

If you have knowledge about this field, you could take some time to share your knowledge so that we can all learn something. If you don't want to take the time to post a substantive comment, that's cool; but in that case please post nothing.

Not all new work is good, of course, but the human bias (on HN as in life) is overwhelmingly to dismiss and trample on it. Here we want a culture that does the opposite: pauses, considers, and responds with respect for the effort involved, if not the surprisingness of the findings.

If several people take months to review the entire literature on an important topic, and present what they found, that's a real service. This deserves respect, not internet snark. Please restrain yourself before commenting like this.

No pop-ups --> 10% as many people join our newsletter --> we can't track whether we are having any impact --> no donations --> website disappears.

I don't find the results that surprising, but many people do.

Regardless of whether your argument is correct [0], I can't imagine your target audience is more likely to sign up (vs. bounce) when hit with a second pop-up before reading half an article.

[0] e.g. pop-ups --> less tech savy users 'dismiss' popup by signing up --> newsletter unread and/or marked as spam --> can't {accurately} track whether you're having any impact --> etc

Yeah you are right, we may be over-doing it. Think we should drop the all-screen one from the first page view when we add a special appeal because of a HN spike? I'll bring that up with the team. :)

Thanks for the suggestion. We have tested whether people who sign up to the newsletter from appeals read it or click on link, and they do at the same rate as everyone else. :)

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