How to get a job in ten years

Unemployment offices HATE these weird tricks.

I’ve interviewed a lot of people in my career. Across two startups, one acquirer, and a handful of small projects earlier in my life, I (and my teams) have hired 300+ people. I interviewed most of them, plus hundreds more we didn’t hire.

We do this interview at Mux we call “Role and Career.” It’s an unusual interview, apparently, or at least the people we interview tell us it’s unusual. I don’t understand why; it’s effective, and we’ve done it for so long that it feels perfectly normal to me, but I guess other companies don’t do it.

The purpose of this interview is to get to know someone. Not to test their skills or knowledge or intelligence, but to understand their background and interests and career arc. If you’re going to bring someone on a team and work closely with them for years, you should probably care about more than just their skills as an engineer or designer or marketer or whatever. Maybe you should also want to know what they’re like as a human, and what they would be like to work with on a team. We start at the beginning: “Tell me about your childhood.” Maybe that’s why people tell us it’s unusual.

What I look for in hiring is pretty simple. Is someone excellent at whatever they’re being hired to do, relative to their level? Will their behavior fit the way I want my teams to work? In our Role and Career interview, we focus on behavior.

I don’t know what AI is going to do to job markets, and I don’t think anyone else does either. If someone confidently tells you that AI is going to cause mass unemployment, or create a world of superabundance, or kill us all, go ahead and discount their confidence by like 90%. The range of possible outcomes is wide, and a lot of important variables are unknowable at this point. If you want to prepare for the AI future, prepare for that whole range.

So: it might be the case that job markets will be harder in ten years. It might be; I’m not sure.

This feels important to me, because I have two teenagers. I’m not an AI doomer, but I feel uncertain and a little anxious on their behalf, and a lot of people in their teens and twenties are feeling uncertain and anxious right now too, or so I’m told.

I think there are three behaviors that will help you succeed and stand out in your career. If you’re 15 or 25, or older, here is my advice to you.

The first behavior is initiative. There is a constellation of behavior around initiative that is also important—like hard work, hunger, ambition, drive—but initiative is the behavior that really sets someone apart.

I interviewed someone a few years ago whose first job was at a giant health care conglomerate. It’s hard to get more bureaucratic and slow-moving than that. The interview was going well, but about halfway through the interview, she jumped from “possible hire” to “strong hire” in my mind.

She told the story of a project she had worked on at the health care conglomerate. There was some annoying internal process in the bureaucracy that everyone hated, and she had built a new software application to make the process better.

At least four things impressed me about her story. 1: She was a junior employee at a megacorp. 2: She wasn’t even a software engineer; she worked on the business side of the house, but she had some technical chops and desire to learn. 3: The application actually rolled out, despite the organization being bureaucratic and slow-moving, because employees loved it.

But the most important part of this story is number 4: No one told her to build this application. She saw a need, took initiative, and made something happen.

The opposite of initiative is passivity. Passivity means you wait for people to tell you what to do, or you wait for opportunities to fall in your lap. This doesn’t mean you’re lazy; you can be hard-working and still be passive. I get how that could be confusing. “I work hard—why am I getting passed over for promotion? Why can’t I break into a new field?” The answer might be passivity. Passivity is a career killer.

The second behavior is humility. This one might be a little controversial, since egotistical people can be really, really successful (exhibit A: politics), but humility still wins 8 times out of 10.

Humility is easy to misunderstand. It doesn’t mean you lack confidence. It doesn’t mean you’re a pushover. It doesn’t mean you can’t have swagger or ambition. I like C.S. Lewis’s definition: humility is not thinking less of yourself; it’s thinking of yourself less.¹

Why is humility useful?

1: Humble people are in it for the team, not for themselves. Steph Curry is the best point guard in basketball history,² and he’s shockingly humble. He’s also confident, ambitious, and supremely competitive. Being humble doesn’t mean he doesn’t play to win—it means he plays to win as a team, not as an individual. This behavior works, because basketball is a team sport, not an individual sport.

Companies are the same. It’s literally in the name: company. Companion. Com (with, together) + panis (bread). Companies are people who share bread.³

Maybe this is why politicians can be egotistical and win. Unlike basketball or business, politics is an individual sport.

2: Humble people are willing to learn. If you think you’re right about everything, how will you ever grow? If you think you’re better than everyone else, or if you put on a game face that says you’re the best, you can’t have a growth mindset. I'll be honest: I have a lot to learn, and that mindset keeps me learning. I’m in my 40s and I’m learning so, so much right now, as a founder and as a human. I hope I’m still learning in my 70s.

For both initiative and humility, you don’t just want a little bit; you want to excel. If you’re in the middle of the pack, expect a middle-of-the-pack career. If you get to top 10%, the sky is the limit.

The third behavior is worth splitting into “basic” and “advanced” mode, because you don’t have to get to the top 10% of this one. Just avoid the bottom quartile, really.

The basic version of this behavior: don’t be toxic. Toxic people ruin teams and drag others down. Ever get a text or an email from someone, and as soon as you see their name—before you even read the message—you feel anxious? Or as soon as they enter the room, you feel your heart sink? That’s what toxic people do to the people around them. No one wants to work with someone who is toxic.

I don’t really know how to give advice on how to avoid being toxic. Toxic people are toxic for a range of reasons: fear, anger, self-doubt, lack of awareness, etc. If you worry you might be toxic, or if people tell you you’re difficult to be around, or if you notice people avoiding you, I guess my advice is: be curious about this, and be open to change.⁴

“Don’t be toxic” is a relatively low bar; most people aren’t toxic. If you’re high initiative and high humility and non-toxic, you’re set up for success, and you should consider applying for a job at Mux.

There is an advanced mode of this behavior, though. It’s a little hard to name, but I’ll try it this way: connect with people well. What’s the common denominator across just about every profession: karate teachers, doctors, landscape architects, choreographers, software engineers, astronauts, politicians, scholars? They all work with people.

Connecting with people is a skill, and it isn’t easy, but it can be learned. It requires vulnerability, self-disclosure, curiosity, care, and annoying things like talking about your feelings. If this sounds touchy-feely to you, it is. There is a famous class in the Stanford MBA program about connecting with people called Interpersonal Dynamics, and its nickname is literally “Touchy-Feely.” If you’re interested in getting good at this, try a t-group or read the Interpersonal Dynamics book.

There is one more piece to “How to get a job in ten years.” I won’t say too much about this, because it’s obvious, and I don’t want to distract from the more interesting points, but it’s still worth saying: you should also be good at whatever you’re doing.

What’s maybe surprising is that the more you grow in your career, the less important this actually is. I have an exec who spent eight years in the military as an intelligence officer. A lesson she learned is that good leaders need to be ready to lead anything. I really think I could drop her into any team, and she would lead it well, no matter the domain. It might not be pretty, and a good leader who is also an expert in their domain would have an edge, but behavioral skills are transferrable.

High initiative, high humility, low toxicity. For bonus points, high connecting. And get good at something or other. That’s how you get a job, or how you still have a job, in ten years, no matter what happens to the world.

I work in tech, as an engineer-turned-startup-founder, but I think this advice applies other places too. If you told me you wanted to become a great writer, or philosopher, or brewer, or musician, or barista, or athlete, I’d offer the same advice. I think it probably worked 200 years ago, and I think it will still work in 200 years.

I don’t know what AI is going to do to job markets, but as long as it doesn’t kill us all, the common denominator behind every single job will be other humans. Get good at making big things happen alongside other humans; get good at winning alongside other humans; and get good at connecting with other humans (or, at minimum, don’t make them hate you).

AI might disrupt technical skills, but behavioral skills are impervious.

1. This is sometimes attributed to Lewis as a direct quotation. That’s not correct; it’s more of a summary of what he says. https://aaronarmstrong.co/what-cs-lewis-wrote-is-better-than-what-he-didnt/

2. I’ll die on this hill.

3. I know etymology isn’t determinate of meaning, but I think the historical roots of this word are still interesting.

4. If you worry you might be toxic and you haven’t tried this yet, consider therapy or coaching or exploring the Enneagram. Things like that can help. I’ve also met people who have done years of therapy and years of self-exploration and who remain toxic, so this isn’t a panacea.