ProbablyGood

Exploring options The process of researching possible career paths can be confusing, and lacking a clear idea of your options only makes it more so. A good place to start is to figure out the scope of your search. What are all the career options that could be relevant for … Read more

Introduction Now that we’ve done all this introspection and investigation, we can get to the task at hand: actually finding a career that’s good for you and good for the world. In the first section of the guide, we talked about what it means to make an impact. We reflected … Read more

Riti’s Tech for Good pursuits To apply the SELF framework to a more real world scenario, we’ll walk through a case study of one person’s consideration process for three specific roles. After completing a bachelor’s in computer science, Riti spent a couple of years working as a software engineer at … Read more

What if you didn’t take the job? Counterfactual impact is another important concept that could potentially change how you assess an impactful opportunity. It refers to the additional benefit (or harm) caused by an action compared to what would have happened if you hadn’t done it. In other words, we … Read more

Increasing your impact over time So far, we’ve discussed how to think about specific roles and assess their potential for doing good. When it comes to actually pursuing these roles, there’s another big consideration to keep in mind: how can your career make the greatest impact over the long run? … Read more

Doing your best work So far, we’ve identified the major factors that contribute to a role’s impact, but you may have felt that something is missing: What about my personal interests or motivation? What if I find an impactful job that isn’t right for me? Where exactly do I fit … Read more

Influencing impact Now that we’ve considered a problem’s significance and a method’s efficacy, let’s get more specific and assess the potential impact of particular roles. This time, we’ll look at role leverage. It’s likely most roles are valuable when you’re working in a high-impact organization, but some roles may enable … Read more

Tackling the problem So we’ve defined a problem and assessed its overall significance in the world. Now, we need to assess the efficacy of our method or means of solving it. In other words, what are we going to do about this problem? And how well will this method work? … Read more

Making a meaningful impact A lot of jobs sound like they’ll do good, but how can you tell if your work would make a meaningful impact on the world? It’s difficult (and probably not helpful) to assess a specific role’s impact without considering its wider context. To understand the potential … Read more

Getting started So let’s check in. At this point, we discussed how your values and moral views may influence the causes you want to work in. Then, we utilized the ITN framework to compare and analyze different cause areas that align with your values. This led us to look into some promising cause areas – … Read more