Recently, I’ve met up with a couple college students who were trying to figure out what to do with their careers. Both were in tech and were deciding between stable, big company jobs and something startup-y (joining or starting a startup).
They asked me for advice. How would I think about the decision from their standpoint?
Baseball has an interesting concept that helps here called WARP (Wins Above Replacement). The WARP of a baseball player is calculated by looking at the additional amount of games that a team wins by having that player on their team instead of a replacement for that player.
It’s easy to understand with an example. Shohei Ohtani is currently one of the best hitters in baseball. If he were killed by an angry sports bookie, the Dodgers would have to find a replacement designated hitter from their farm team or free agency to replace him. The Dodgers presumably would be worse and would win fewer games with the replacement player than with Shohei. You calculate Shohei’s WARP by comparing the number of wins that the Dodgers would get by having Shohei rather than a replacement player.
I love this concept and I think it can be applied nicely to career decisions.
If I compete for a job at Google and win a slot as a software engineer, what is the impact of me doing that job rather than someone else? I like to think that I’m smart and hard working, but do I actually expect to be able to be much more impactful than the replacement level software engineer? Probably not.
Ok let’s look at startups. If you join a hot startup that has a bunch of people applying, your WARP is actually probably still pretty low. Maybe you have an absolute impact because the startup does a lot with the small team, but if the startup is hot they are presumably deciding between other candidates that are similar to you.
If you really want to increase your WARP, you need to do something unexpected (or just be really, really good like Shohei or LeBron). If you have a skill and apply it in an unexpected way, you can generate a remarkably high WARP. I like the example of Yuyang Gu who had a background in finance and during COVID created the best model predicting COVID’s spread and future deaths. He was the only solo person predicting COVID. There is simply no replacement for Yuyang and thus he has a tremendously high WARP.
So if you want to make a life choice, it’s good to think about what would happen if you didn’t make that choice. Would someone else seamlessly fill your spot? Or are you doing something that’s truly irreplaceable and unique?
Addendum: I don't think this is an encompassing life philosophy and often concerns like happiness and practicality supersede WARP. But it's interesting to think about and it's certainly important if you end up managing a baseball team.