The topic is not the content

Looking back on the ten years I spent teaching piano lessons to children, do I think that this framework would have helped me decide if it was a good career?

The topic was music. One way of describing the content was a combination of sitting down with children, managing behavior, explaining how to read music, correcting errors, negotiating with parents, accounting, driving between houses, buying music books, workshopping learning and emotional challenges, inventing new approaches to teaching songwriting and improvisation, and providing encouragement. I could have anticipated that with forethought.

That dry verbal description captures absolutely nothing of the rich and rewarding experience I had teaching music lessons. And just getting a sense of the day-to-day, as by job shadowing another teacher, would have also been more deceptive than descriptive. Having relationships with children that evolve and deepen over the course of years, experimenting with solutions to problems and having the satisfaction of seeing some of those solutions work out, and creating musical performances at nursing homes that put a smile on the face of the elderly residents, are experiences that become vastly more interesting and meaningful when it's your life, rather than somebody else's.

So my concern with this approach of focusing on the content, rather than the topic, is that I suspect I'd have been really bad at anticipating the content. And the more work I put into it, I suspect the more confident that I would have become in my misinterpretation. Coming into a job with a sense of mission and purpose, but an open-ended sense of what it was actually going to be like, actually seems to me like a better approach than trying to somehow imagine how the day-to-day experience will feel like from the inside, and then trying to choose from the imagined option that seems the most attractive a priori.

For me, the focus on the topic of music, rather than the content of teaching, helped spark my imagination for what music lessons could be like. I wanted to do something very different from the way I'd been taught growing up.

Maybe another way of pointing at the same thing is that topic/content is not actually the division that makes the most sense to me. Instead, it's something like "psychology/behavior." It's the division between what the job feels like to do, in terms of the emotions, ideas, and stories involved, versus the concrete physical and social activities you perform on a daily basis. The former seems much more important to me than the latter, from a meaningfulness perspective. Behavior is important for your experience, in terms of energy expenditure, risks of injury, and so on. But meaningfulness is often a big component of what keeps people at their jobs, and I just don't think that a focus on "content" would have helped me connect with or anticipate that aspect of my previous line of work.

If you’re a physics teacher, the content is physics, but the topic is (I assume) some combination of grading papers

"Content" and "topic" appear to be reversed in this sentence.

The post overall seems mostly correct. This also applies to subjects you might study in university - how cool something sounds bears little relation to what you'll actually be doing.

The Wait But Why article "Life is a Picture, But You Life in a Pixel" makes this same point and is what caused me to start explicitly focusing on evaluating jobs this way years ago.

A good read: https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/life-is-picture-but-you-live-in-pixel.html

I am deeply impressed; after two decades of career experience, what you wrote seems to me both correct and very important.

The obvious missing part is money; I know people who have meaningful and enjoyable jobs, but can only afford them because their partner pays most of the bills. I am not sure about the exact relationship between "enjoyable" and "well paid"; on one hand, it would make sense to be a tradeoff, on the other hand, there are many jobs that suck and pay little. Still, we should pay attention to make the tradeoff consciously (taking a better paid job that sucks but has a perspective of early retirement; or taking a worse paid but enjoyable job because those eight hours a workday actually contribute a lot to the total quality of life) rather than by mistake taking a job that pays less, has an attractive topic, but the content mostly sucks (the video game industry seems to be a popular example).

I wonder whether there is a job out there that would be enjoyable for me and is actually paid well, but I will never figure it out, either because I have never heard about it (or never considered it seriously), or because I am deeply mistaken about its content. This sounds horrifying, and not completely unlikely. I wonder if there are some "job content advisors" that could help me with this.

One complication is that the job content can change significantly over years, both within the company, and within the entire industry. My experience is with software development. In the same company, at nominally the same position, my job content has in few years changed from "develops new features in one project, together with other experienced developers, learns new stuff" (enjoyable) to "does maintenance and plumbing in multiple projects, working alone but reporting to multiple managers, attends lots of meetings" (not enjoyable). Also -- not sure whether this is true about the industry in general, or just my bubble, -- the job content in general seems to be moving away from "works on a well-defined project, mostly undisturbed" (enjoyable) towards "does whatever managers decide is the highest priority today, with tight deadlines but lots of interruptions" (not enjoyable). So the career that felt like the right choice 20 years ago, does not feel so now.

Replace "content" with "process" and this makes sense to me.

"content" and "topic" are not synonymous, for me of course.
But "topic" is like the headline and "content" is the text below it.
So both deal very much with the subject matter.
But also you use "content" synonymously with "topic" informally.
In a pars-pro-toto/totum pro tarte-way.
So this whole article feels super-confusing.

Curated. I like how this post makes a conceptual clarification and turns it into practical advice, or perhaps it captures practical advice into a neat conceptual distinction–in either case, I think it's very neat when you can do that. While I suspect that quite a few people make poor career decisions for exactly the reasons described in this post,  I'm motivated to curate because I really like the mental motion of the post more than I expect the concrete advice to be important for people reading it.

The curation is also partially for the good discussion on this post. I like AllAmericanBreakfast's great comment [LW(p) · GW(p)] where he cautions that estimating the content of an occupation is hard, and similarly ryan_b's on the importance of meaning/purpose.

A very good point.

I'd add the caveat that a key issue in a job is not the just the content, but who you interact in. eg a graduate student job in a lab can be very interesting even if the work is mindless, because of the people you get to interact with.

The importance of emphasizing "activity" versus "topic" or "industry" is very important when considering jobs. However, in advising students and talking with many people, I find that a lot of people genuinely are motivated by just being in a certain industry. It makes them happy to know they are a part of an industry they love, even if the job activities are not very good for them or especially rewarding. That cost is offset by the benefit of being in "the industry" or sometimes by having coworkers they like.

The career guide book "What Color is Your Parachute" makes these distinctions and is superbly useful at helping you determine your indifference curves.

try to figure out how to get your government-issued laptop with 16 gb of RAM to handle downloading, analyzing, and uploading 5 gb .csv files (spreadsheets) with millions and millions of rows using R” (answer: it’s hard).

Have you considered using Dask instead?

When I went to work in a bookshop, I expected the content to be "take the money, give the book". It was so much more than that. Had I thought about it like "ensure the easy and comfortable way to take the money and give the book", I'd have had a better handle on it. The missing ingredient was the realisation of my own responsibility for the end result (and also luck doesn't hurt.)

Related: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GfWJCF3rqdW48D7k8/be-specific-about-your-career [EA · GW]

You might consider cross-posting this to the EA forum.

"lack of major negatives like unfair pay" - oh it's alright then, the job I have in mind has no such menial additions as pay at all)))

From Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance (highlight mine)

John looks at the motorcycle and he sees steel in various shapes and has negative feelings about these steel shapes and turns off the whole thing. I look at the shapes of the steel now and I see ideas. He thinks I’m working on parts. I’m working on concepts.

If the work is exciting at the conceptual level, the content won't matter. It's only when you construe the content conceptually as something aversive does the problem arise.

Content is neutral.

As a UX designer, 90% of my work involves drawing rectangles. But that's now how I(or any other designer) see it. Conceptually I'm making an Interface [LW · GW].

This piece is smart and thoughtful.
There are few 'jobs' where the topic = content. When you study to become and Engineer, your job content has a chance of (at best) being fractionally related to engineering. That's possibly more true for lawyers (if you stay with the practice of law) and definitely more true if you learn a skilled trade (carpentry, etc.)
I'll happily add this lens to my own thinking and my responses when I am asked this kind of question in the future.