Tag: misfits

Jobs and courtship

Jobs, unlike romantic relationships, don’t come with a courtship period. You basically go for a bunch of interviews and at the end of it both parties (you and the employer) have to decide whether it is going to be a good fit. Neither party has complete information – you don’t know what a typical day at the job is like, and your employer doesn’t know much about your working style. And so both of you are taking a risk. And there is a significant probability that you are actually a misfit and the “relationship” can go bad.

For the company it doesn’t matter so much if the odd job goes bad. They’ll usually have their recruitment algorithm such that the probability of a misfit employee is so low it won’t affect their attrition numbers. From the point of view of the employees, though, it can get tough. Every misfit you go through has to be explained at the next interview. You have a lot of misfits, and you’re deemed to be an unfaithful guy (like being called a “much-married man”). And makes it so tough for you to get another job that you are more likely to stumble into one where you’re a misfit once again!

Unfortunately, it is not practical for companies to hire interns. I mean, it is a successful recruitment strategy at the college-students level but not too many people are willing to get into the uncertainty of a non-going-concern job in the middle of their careers. This risk-aversion means that a lot of people have no option but to soldier on despite being gross misfits.

And then there are those that keep “divorcing” in an attempt to fit in, until they are deemed unemployable.

PS: In this regard, recruitments are like arranged marriage. You make a decision based on a handful of interviews in simulated conditions without actually getting to know each other. And speaking of arranged marriage, I reprise this post of mine from six years ago.

Arranged Scissors 9 – Cost Benefit Analysis

Neha, also known as MotherJane, writes in her blog:

…I do not believe in love. Partners offer solutions to everyday issues like running a house, satisfying needs and filling in the blanks. However they come at a cost – often too high to bother. Still we go ahead and do the trade – its just what we do. In our lives friends become the people we talk and listen to, partners become people we are forced to talk and listen to, so that we can have everything else they offer. If you think about it, your relationship is already transactional. If calling it love makes easier on your conscience, I won’t hold you back.

I was trying to figure out how it all fits in with the arranged scissors process. And every time the answer came out that the Arranged Scissors process is fairly irrational.Mainly because of the short time for decision. A few basic checks are made, obvious misfits are checked for, and things get “done”.

The biggest cost of getting married (which Neha doesn’t mention) is the opportunity cost of the option of getting married to any of the other women in this world apart from your wife. Divorce is messy and expensive (in more ways than one), and hence once you have hitched yourself to someone, this opportunity cost immediately kicks in.

Later in her post, Neha talks about the “friends-with-benefits” model, but the problem with that is that it doesn’t help propagate your genes. It is tough to raise kids in that kind of an environment, and considering that the purpose of life is to procreate (this is the general case; i konw you may be an exception so don’t shout at me for this) the friends-with-benefits model is not stable. The reason the world has settled down into a model of bilateral commitment is to optimize the costs and benefits of propagating genes.

So if you want to propagate your genes (again, I’m not sure if you want to. If you don’t, I’d recommend you to settle down with the FWB model – but then it’s easier to find one stable counterparty rather than several FWBs, so you’d rather get married) you need to get into a bilateral commitment deal. And these deals are mutually exclusive so you need to realize that when you get into one, you will be foregoing the option of getting into any other.

There are several other costs and benefits when it comes to the marriage thing – there will be lifestyle changes, you get “tied down”, you need to take on responsibility, share duties and all that, but in my humble  (and unmarried) opinion, the biggest cost is the opportunity cost.

I say this quite often (and this reminds me, I have a paper to write – which I’ve postponed for nine months now) but I think outside of the financial world, option value is generally underrated (even in finance options are more often than not undervalued since the most common pricing formula ignores fat tails). And in settling for a Common Minimum Programme in the arranged marriage market, people severely underestimate the value of the option value of the rest of the world.

So the next time you want to propose to someone, or want to answer “the question” in the affirmative, make sure you do the following:

  • Make a list of all the people in the world belonging to the opposite sex (gays feel free to generalize this)
  • Evaluate the option of marrying them. Your job will be quite easy because with respect to most people, either you don’t want to marry them or you know that the chance of them marrying you is so infinitesimally small that the option value is negligible
  • I’m sure there will be a number of peopl ewho you prefer to the person you are proposing to/saying yes to. If you think there is a nonzero chance of them saying yes to you, ask them. Rejection is cheaper than a lifetime of guilt
  • Once all the options have been evaluated, and an additional buffer term added to account for all the people you don’t know yet, you know the full value of the opportunity cost. Then add up the other costs and benefits, and then make your decision.

Typically to know the other costs and benefits of the person that you are currently evaluating, you need to know them rather well. Yes, you can draw a sample and estimate the population based on that, but the cost of a type 1 error (error of commission) is very high. So make sure you collect enough data. To collect enough data, make sure you give yourself enough time.

Ok now I don’t know the point of this post. I don’t even konw if it fits into the arranged scissors series, but I think I’ll let it stay. Changing the title is too messy. I think I wrote this to put fundaes about opportunity cost. Maybe I had something else in mind when I thought up this post, but then subsequently forgot the contents and remembered only the outline. In any case, I’ll stop here. Before that I’ll tell you for one last time that you need to keep track of option value, and opportunity cost.