Having savings gives you some time before you have to get something part time to help out with bills. When you’re between jobs, it’s not vacation time. Your job is too find another job. You should spend the 8 hours or so you would have spent working instead preparing your resume, brushing up on interview skills, searching for and applying to jobs, and responding to emails. Depending on your field there may be some short term contract work available that will help you pay the bills while you look for something permanent. The point is: don’t just sit on your butt, get it in gear.
I did this poorly, i had almost 20g saved, and i went on trips, explored, and adventured, then the final week of money, went and handed out 3 resumes and got hired on the spot with the 3rd.
Its alot tougher to save it up now, i changed my mind about wgere i wanted to work. Im a journeyman electrician, and travel work i made stacks, no fixed address, living in work camps and just slaving. But after the break i thought thats just killing me, i have no friends outside of work and my whole life was being an electrician. Now i work 8h in a shop in a city of my choosing and have 16h a day for me.
I still looked for jobs, but since I had a good 3 months of buffer I wasn’t hard pressed to take any shotty offers, and was able to accurately apply the algorithm for the Suitors Problem.
Google the Suitors Problem solution for the efficient way to search for jobs and minax your odds of getting a good offer.
The suitors problem (aka the 37% rule, an optimal stopping algorithm) doesn’t apply to job offers unless you have to either accept or decline the offers on the spot. A better solution would just be set a deadline of date x, tell each job offer you’ll have an offer to them by date x, look at all of your options together, and pick the best.
The time to implement the suitors problem or 37% rule is when you have to accept or decline each option as you see it. You know what you’ve declined, but not what is left. A very micro example is you have 3 playing cards, and you want as high of a value as possible. (I’m also adding in the threshold rule, it significantly improves the 37% rule).
Card 1: if it’s not an ace (98th + percentile), don’t keep it
Card 2: if it’s higher than card 1, or is a king (90th percentile), keep it. Otherwise, leave it.
Card 3: you have to take it if you didn’t take card 1 or card 2.
The purpose of the 37% rule isn’t necessarily to pick the best option, just to pick a good option, and it’s the best algorithm for the specific scenarios that you apply it in, and is significantly (and statistically) more likely to give you a better option than other methods. It can be applied where choices > 2, has a set max number of choices, and all of the choices are randomly ordered.
I would go into it more, but my last long explanation and examples didn’t post correctly. For some great reading (even if you don’t have a math background!) I highly recommend Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christen and Tom Griffiths.
The suitors problem (aka the 37% rule, an optimal stopping algorithm) doesn’t apply to job offers unless you have to either accept or decline the offers on the spot.
Yeah the thing is typically you only have fairly short windows to accept/pass on job offers. At least here in North America, I usually wasn’t given a very long opportunity to make my choice for a given offer. Usually tops 1-2 days to say yes or no once an offer is tabled. If I lingered on it too long, they would usually go with someone else who can decide faster.
Which meant usually tops I only had 2-3 offers tops on my table at the exact same time.
By comparison usually the interview process took about a week on average, total.
And, yes, once you decline a tabled offer you are much less likely to be able to go back and get it again, from my experience.
The suitors problem, in a high flow environment where job offers come and go every day on the fly… does indeed apply quite well.
And thats what I did, I estimated I could go for about 4 months if I tightened the pursestrings, so I spent the first month and a bit gathering job offers and simply just writing everything down in a spreadsheet, and created a scoring algorithm to rank them all based on wage, benefits, bonuses, remote vs in office vs hybrid, and a bunch of other variables.
Once I felt satisfied that I had a ranking formula that “felt” right, I took the highest scoring job on that list from the first month of data, and then started actually seriously considering offers and took the first job that gave me an offer that scored higher than that highest score from prior data.
I also recommend Algorithms to Live By, haha, it’s an awesome book and I’m gonna +1 that recommendation to anyone else who reads this thread XD
I want to note that by following this process, I over doubled my wage compared to my last job, and if I had just jumped on the first half decent offer I got early on, I would have been making about 2/3rds the wage of the job I actually ended up holding out for.
Ahh I didn’t realize some jobs were like that. When I was in my job search last year as a new grad I had 4 job offers and they were all fine with me taking until the end of the month (2 1/2 weeks for the earliest offer, coincidentally the one I picked and am very happy at)
I quit my job 90 days ago. The day I quit I had a ticket to the galapagos islands booked for 3 weeks of travel there. I took my time when I got back to get everything in order and relax. I ticked off 2 more national parks in the PNW and got a lot of mountain biking done.
Once I got back my job search was looking for companies and projects that I think are likely to turn into something. I went through a lot of interview rounds before I accepted a job offer a few days ago for a non-profit in biomedical data.
Sounds ideal. Last time I did this in a similar way. I did apply to 2-5 roles a week which were amazing and appealing roles to me though, with the result I got to keep unemployment insurance requirements met, which paid for my very cheap travel expenses overseas. Eventually one of the long shot roles worked out, and I booked flight home to start work.
I got burnt out between my last job and my current one. I quit and took 3 months off before starting my current job.
Admittedly I had ~30k saved and went through about 15k of that in the 3 months as I went travelling etc. but I wasn’t stressed. I emailed some friends and shot some old colleagues on linkedin saying I was looking. An old friend got me an interview in the first month, went through the whole process in about 2 weeks after that and had a new job lined up 1 month before I was due back home. But I didn’t have that “Oh shit, I need to start my new job ASAP! I’m fucked!!!” panic which was nice.
I was also much more relaxed in the interviews etc. because I wasn’t panicking for work, instead I became super picky about what I wanted and was very open about it. Asked for more money, was open about what I actually want to do and it all worked out. It was amazing - in the past I was more trying to escape a bad workplace vs. going “I know what I want, can you make this work for both of us?”
I’d become an Uber driver, and I’d only take jobs that were 100% definitely better than that. I’d make sure to earn everything I needed so that my $10k isn’t drawn down.
Having the space to reject jobs and take one’s time is an excellent resource during a job search. A nice long one.
That would stress me the fuck out to only have $10k to live off of until I got another job. If I already had a job I’d just keep it until I found a new one. And it looks better if you have a job when you’re looking for a new one. What kind of employer wants to hire someone who doesn’t have good enough sense to stay out of that kind of situation? They’d have to wonder what could have happened to make you leave one job without having another one lined up. From their perspective how would they know if the problem was the other people or if it was you? And when there are other candidates to choose from, why would they choose the one that might bring a lot of drama?
I’m in that exact situation right now thought I have more savings than that.
I’m approaching job search differently in the way that I’m not in-fact looking for job. I’m taking my time to decompress, gather my thoughts and plan what I’m going to do in the future. I think I’m going to try entrepreneurship and set up my own company and start doing handyman stuff instead of just plumbing what I’ve been doing to this point. I’m not overly excited about the idea of going back to work for a company. I got to check this door first atleast.
$100k I would be more relaxed, pay off everything except the house to lower monthly cost and try to find something perfect, that provided enough to live on.
$1M, I would retire, probably, or work part time, not worry about making enough to live on.
$10M, I would absolutely start a business, profit sharing co-op.
$100M, I would set up an endowment for charity for those in my city and probably sell my house and just travel.
Having adequate savings and/or additional income absolutely changes the job hunting game. This is one of the big reasons they having a 6-month emergency fund of necessary expenses is critical for financial health. It reduces the needs to make decisions that sacrifice long term benefit for short term survival. Like for many here, $10k is not that number for my household. We need much more in savings for a family of 4 with disabilities.
But let’s talk about how it changes the job hunt. The big answer is that you do not need to take any given offer. You can hold out for the right offer. For my wife, that meant passing up higher-paying contract roles and roles with less-than-ideal management and work life balance situations. When she found the right job, the heading she was working with was very clear, “This is the type of company where the pay will not look as great as some at first. Look at the benefits. Look at the employee reviews. This is the last job I am ever going to find for you.”
Having a safety net let us hold off until my wife found the right job. It was not about “knowing your worth” where you then ask for too much. It was about finding the best match. That ideal match has been very good for my family for many years now.
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