Thread by @alexcornell

1/ It's wise to constantly evaluate the opportunity cost of your job:

What you do vs. What you could do

In the tech industry, a comparison is often drawn between working at a startup vs. a big company. When I started working at Facebook, I thought about this a lot. (1/20)

2/ To compare different paths, we use values like personal fulfillment, learning potential, autonomy, compensation, community, impact on the world etc. Ideally, you work in a job which maximizes the values that are most important to you.

3/ Your job's opportunity cost depends on how well your job satisfies your essential values, compared to the next best alternative. Most people are pretty good at evaluating the values of their current role.

4/ This is especially true for values that can be easily measured and compared, like compensation. It's harder for values like fulfillment, which require a lot of introspection and can be difficult to compare concretely.

5/ Output, or "impact", is an important value for many people. It's often cited as one of the primary benefits of working at a big company (your input will impact a lot of people, in some cases *billions* of people).

Let's refer to the scale of your impact as "surface area".

6a/ When considering impact, there is one crucial variable which is often overlooked: efficiency. By this I mean, how much input (effort, time) is required to produce your desired output, without waste. Another way to refer to efficiency is "pace".

6b/ Calling it "pace" places a small bias on *time* as a fraction of input, which lets just accept for now. A longer essay could be written about *effort* as it relates to efficiency, but that's for another time.

7/ If you value impact you have to think about efficiency. The relevant equation sort of looks like this: pace x surface area = impact.

8/ So how is impact affected? Well, before we added pace as a variable, the equation was pretty straightforward: the job with the largest surface area would deliver the most impact.

Pace has a dramatic effect on this equation.

9/ At a big company, the surface area is massive but the pace is very slow. It could take 2 years to release something that was built in 1 month.

At a startup, the surface area is small but the pace is very fast. You could release something tomorrow that was built today.

10/ This changes how impact is calculated, and how you should think about opportunity cost. If you don't consider pace, you will be misled into thinking that time isn't relative, which is an *expensive* miscalculation (like on Interstellar's water planet where 1 hour = 7 years).

11/ Basically one-day-here DOES NOT equal one-day-there. You need to think about impact on a much longer time horizon to properly account for pace.

Many people do not do this, which is why I'm tweeting about it.

12/ Now, it's possible that massive surface area, even after inefficiency dilution, still returns acceptable impact. Your opportunity cost equation might still work.

As long as you've accounted for this, then you can be confident in your decision to be wherever you are.

13/ Here is a personal example. The first three years I worked at Facebook, were very efficient. I was learning insanely fast, working with incredible people, and our small team was responsible for a massive product, Facebook Live.

This was an *incredible* experience.

14/ Over time, my role expanded and I started working on all Video products. I worked on Live, Watch, and Social Video. I focused mostly on presence – impactful work that was deeply meaningful and fulfilling to me. I loved it.

15/ As my role grew, so too did the size of the product teams. Team size (when not directly correlated with need) is one of the primary causes of inefficiency.

16/ I'm oversimplifying, but the inefficiencies that came with these inevitable changes, changed the balance of my opportunity cost equation. I had no choice but to quit, as every additional day was actually costing me months (relative to working on the outside).

17/ In doing so, my surface area was substantially reduced, but my pace dramatically increased. This was a trade I was willing to make, given the overall opportunity cost when considered on a long enough time horizon.

18/ Obviously a lot more went into my decision, but "the efficiency equation" as I referred to it internally, was a large part of it.

So I say to you: consider efficiency. If you don't, you might be making an exponentially costly mistake when deciding what to do with your life.

19/ Note: Impact is one of many values that affect opportunity cost. I chose to focus on it here because it's one of the most vulnerable values to inefficiency.

The above is meant to be helpful. Don't be a jerk and get outraged over something irrelevant to this line of reasoning

20/ I'm new to tweet storms. If you prefer normal writing, I've posted the above on a single page here:

alexcornell.com/the-hidden-var…