Career 101

[Note: this module is in-progress, but we’ve included resources here for those of you who may find them helpful!]

How can you have a career you are proud of?

How can you do great work, start your own company, or become successful?

How can you offer your services to businesses as a freelancer?

If you’re interested in any of these questions, read on!

How to succeed in your career and do great work:

  1. How to do great work - Paul Graham

  2. How to be successful - Sam Altman

  3. How to be more agentic - Cate Hall

  4. Writes and Write-Nots - Paul Graham

  5. How not to lose your job to AI - Benjamin Todd, 80,000 Hours

  6. How to Freelance

What employers want now that AI is here:

  1. Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify - Tobi Lütke

  2. How to use Claude during our hiring process - Anthropic

  3. Yes, You Can Use AI in Our Interviews - Canva

  4. Management as AI Superpower - Ethan Mollick

  5. Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer - Patrick McKenzie

  6. Canaries in the Coal Mine - Stanford Digital Economy Lab, on what AI is doing to entry-level jobs

Show your work:

  1. How Sholto Douglas got hired at Google by doing research in public - Dwarkesh Podcast (at 1:34:40)

  2. Working at top AI labs without a degree - Chris Olah

  3. How To Become A Mechanistic Interpretability Researcher - Neel Nanda: “provide compelling, hard-to-fake evidence of your skills”

  4. A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people - Henrik Karlsson

  5. Learn In Public - swyx

  6. What to blog about - Simon Willison

How to break into tech:

  1. How I Became A Programmer

  2. https://x.com/GabrielPeterss4/status/1898566138352820561

  3. Prototypes are the new cover letter

  4. How To Get Hired at a Startup

  5. Ways to Stand Out When You Apply for a Startup

  6. Career Development Guide for Job Seekers - Casey Handmer

  7. The guide to getting a job with cold email - Ben Lang

  8. Referrals - Ashby: referred candidates get interviews at more than 10x the rate of cold applicants

  9. Why and how we do work trials - Linear

The hottest new job, forward deployed engineer:

  1. Why the Forward Deployed Engineer Is the Hottest Job in Startups - a16z

  2. WTF is a forward deployed engineer? - PostHog

  3. Reflections on Palantir - Nabeel Qureshi

Where to apply to startups:

  1. Workatastartup - literally apply to startups
  2. Recurse Center - continue your education for free now that you’re el33t.
  3. Buildlist - work at a company building real things
  4. Pampam City Job Listings - get a job in NYC
  5. More curated jobs - good curated jobs, including how much they’re hiring
  6. Built in NYC - tech companies in NYC!
  7. Job Listings on Hacker News - Get a job!!
  8. Career Brew - tech job digest on substack
  9. vansh.nyc internships - list of 100s of internships
  10. More job listings from Jordan Mazer, a16z
  11. Even more job listings from nextplay and from BEN LANG

Negotiate your offer:

  1. Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued - Patrick McKenzie

  2. Ten Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer - Haseeb Qureshi

Don’t know how to get someone’s email? Do this:

  1. Use the Apollo Extension