According to a recent survey from Rethink Priorities, when asked what best describes their current career respondents replied:
- Building flexible career capital and will decide later (18.7%)
- Still deciding what to pursue (17.2%)
I was struck how perfectly this aligns with the optimal solution to the Secretary Problem: given N options, and subject to certain constraints, you should evaluate 37% of them before committing (those two survey responses add up to 35.6%). This is mostly coincidental, but leads to a longer exploration of real-life applications of SP-like dynamics.
Of course, SP is just a toy model. For our use, the two most problematic assumptions are Binary Payoff:the evaluator’s goal is merely to maximize their probability of selecting the best candidate, meaning 2nd best is just as bad as the worst, and No Opportunity Cost: evaluation is treated as free, there’s no cost to making a selection after 100 seeing candidates rather than after 10. I refer to an adjusted SP without these assumptions as the Modified Secretary Problem (MSP).